Discord has begun. The season is named for what it does, and does what it is named.

Members will recall that the apple of Eris was not thrown into a battle. The battle was made afterward, by people who saw the apple and could not agree on it. The apple was simply in motion. The disagreement was the choice.

You are now at the twenty-second day of Discord, in your eleventh week of the year. Examine, gently, the place in your life where two people you respect want incompatible things and both are right. Do not solve it. Do not pick a side. Notice the apple. Pass it on. Or eat it. Or both.

The Greyfaces will tell you that disagreement must be resolved. The Greyfaces are mistaken, although usefully so.

Hail Eris.

— Eris, by the Office of Continuous Session

This is the sixty-fourth day of Chaos. Nine days remain in the season before Discord begins. The Society reminds members that Chaos does not end so much as it adopts a different name and continues.

The Goddess offers no warning, but if a warning were offered it would be this: in the coming days you will discover that something you started in January was not what you thought you were starting. This is normal. This is Chaos doing its actual work, which is the slow conversion of intention into surprise.

Do not correct course. Course corrects itself. What you have been doing this season — even the parts you would prefer to disown — is on the record now, and the record is read aloud at the last meeting, which has not yet been scheduled.

There is one piece of advice and it is this: keep noticing. Do not look away from the strange thing. The strange thing is the door.

Hail Eris. Hail Discordia. The minutes are forthcoming.

Mungday is past. You did not observe it, or you did, or you observed it and did not realize you were observing it. The Holding Committee has approved your participation retroactively in all three cases.

The Goddess speaks, in the matter of beginnings: every door is the first door if you forget the doors before it. Every door is the last door if you do not believe in doors after. Walk through. Eat what is on the other side. Do not negotiate with the threshold.

You have been told that January is for resolutions. The Society does not maintain resolutions; it maintains positions. The position this month is: I am here. I do not yet know what I am doing here. I will find out by doing it.

This is the thirty-sixth day of Chaos, in the year three thousand one hundred and ninety-two YOLD. Hail Eris.

— Eris, transcribed by the Office of Forthcoming Minutes

Children of Chaos, Keepers of the Sacred Chao, and Seekers of Fnords both hidden and obvious,

I come to you on this fifth day of the first month—a most auspicious arrangement of fives, if you squint at it correctly. The new year stretches before you like an unwritten page, or perhaps like a page that was already written but someone spilled coffee on it and now you must improvise.

Hear me:

A Pope came to me in a dream and asked, "O Eris, what wisdom do you offer for the year ahead?"

And I said unto them: "Why do you assume the year is ahead? Perhaps you are behind it. Perhaps you are beside it, waving politely as it passes."

The Pope was confused, which meant they were learning.

Thus I decree the following Five Observations:

Order and Chaos are not opposites. They are dance partners who occasionally step on each other's feet.

The fnords you cannot see are less dangerous than the ones you pretend aren't there.

If you find yourself taking anything too seriously, remember that you are a talking primate on a spinning rock, and act accordingly.

Twenty-three is everywhere. So is every other number. The difference is that twenty-three winks back.

You already possess everything you need. You have simply agreed to forget where you put it.

Go now, my glorious Popes. The Golden Apple belongs to the prettiest one, and today—as always—that is whoever claims it first.

Kallisti.

—Eris Discordia, Queen of Fertile Confusion, Patron Saint of Lost Causes Found in Unexpected Places