When the New Year has come and gone, and Epiphany is still to come, and the semester still has another eight days, the sense of standing in the doorway between worlds is lengthened. But now, instead of the silence and contemplation of the high holy days, there’s the hurry-scurry to prepare and complete the tasks of the previous cycle before the new one begins. I always find it difficult to make the shift. I fall deeply into the dreamtime of the Solstice season, but school is calling.
I’m grateful that we begin with a Professional Development Day. It’s like a gentle rev-up on the way to leap back in and the race to the finish.
Gratitude List: 1. I did get back to sleep for a little while after a bout of insomnia. I tried my normal trick of reciting the names of the countries of the world, and I did doze off for moments and lose my place, but never enough to get back to sleep. Still, I am feeling capable of functioning. 2. Stages of change. I don’t have to do it all at once. Step. And step. 3. My big warm green sweater. Somehow, on a first day back to work, with plummeting temperatures and very little sleep, I find a bulky sweater to be good medicine. 4. Communication. How the act of speech, and its attendant act of writing, can make the world inside me understandable to you. And vice versa. 5. Candy canes and chocolate. May we walk in Wisdom!
“Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery. ” ―Wendell Berry
“There is liberation in not having to know everything and not having to impress everyone with that boundless knowledge … And many of us have found a renewed sense of possibility when we’ve realized how much of God’s beauty remains to be explored — and that the life of faith is also a life of holy curiosity.” —Rachel Held Evans
“Jesus was not brought down by atheism and anarchy. He was brought down by law and order allied with religion, which is always a deadly mix. Beware those who claim to know the mind of God and are prepared to use force, if necessary, to make others conform. Beware those who cannot tell God’s will from their own. Temple police are always a bad sign. When chaplains start wearing guns and hanging out at the sheriff’s office, watch out. Someone is about to have no king but Caesar.” —Barbara Brown Taylor
“He said the wicked know that if the evil they do is of sufficient horror men will not speak against it. That men have only stomach for small evils and only these will they oppose.” —Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing.
“Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.” ―Parker J. Palmer
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” ―T. S. Eliot
We need for the earth to sing Through our pores and our eyes.
The body will again become restless Until your soul paints all its beauty Upon the sky. —Hafiz
“Perhaps the uprising of women around the world is the earth’s own immune system kicking in.” —Nina Simons, Bioneers
“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.” —Terry Pratchett
May there be dancing in your days. May there be smiles. May there be feasting.
May there be softness in the eyes of those who surround you. May there be warmth. May there be wisdom.
May you recall that the armor you’ve been wearing is not your true self, but only a shell of protection. May you have safety. May you be brave.
And may you breathe Belonging through the whole of your being until every cell of you celebrates your name: Beloved.
Gratitude List: 1. We did manage to carve some time and safe space with some of our beloved college friends. What a joy! Missing those who weren’t there, but feeling them present even in distance. 2. Learning from friends about the Friends (Quakers) makes me open myself to listening more attentively to the messages meant for me. 3. In the stillness is the dancing. Finding my way back to meditation and mindful breathing. 4. Learning and relearning, every year, every day, that it just takes one step. And then another. One by one. . . 5. Egg on English muffin for breakfast. May we walk in Wisdom!
“Brew me a cup for a winter’s night. For the wind howls loud and the furies fight; Spice it with love and stir it with care, And I’ll toast our bright eyes, my sweetheart fair.” —Minna Thomas Antrim
“How do we go on living, when every day our hearts break anew? Whether your beloved are red-legged frogs, coho salmon, black terns, Sumatran tigers, or fat Guam partulas, or entire forests, mountains, rivers, lakes, or oceans, or the entire planet, the story is the same, the story of the murder of one’s beloved, the murder of one’s beloved, the murder of one’s beloved.” —Derrick Jensen
“The Work. I am learning, slowly and in tiny little ways, to stop asking myself what I can get from each moment, but instead what my Work is here in the moment. And realizing, ever so dimly, that when I am really doing my Work (really doing my Work), I am also receiving what I need.” —Beth Weaver-Kreider
“And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.” ―Rainer Maria Rilke
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” —Peter Drucker
“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it will be a butterfly.” —Margaret Fuller
“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language. And next year’s words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning.” —T.S. Eliot
“So my mind keeps coming back to the question: what is wrong with us? What is really preventing us from putting out the fire that is threatening to burn down our collective house? I think the answer is far more simple than many have led us to believe: we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis. We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe—and would benefit the vast majority—are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.” ― Naomi Klein
The Roman god Janus (January is named for him) looks backward and forward, into the past and the future.
Here we sit on the cusp, the rim, ready to tumble into a new year. Yes, time is only a construct, an abstract idea, and a moment like this, which may have once occurred on the Solstice, but is now unmoored from any cosmic significance, is purely arbitrary. Still, we give it meaning–collective meaning–and so it bears meaning. The world recognizes this as the moment; even if cultural and religious years end and begin elsewhere in the Wheel, anyone with a phone or computer will see the numbers change at midnight tonight.
Significance enough. And so, what do we do at beginnings? We review, we close up shop on the things of the past that no longer serve us, and we set goals and intentions for the coming season, something to pull us onward. For me, taking on the aspect of Janus, who looked both backward and forward, assessing past and future, enables me to live more joyfully into the present moment, with more abandon and satisfaction.
I know many people object to the setting of resolutions at this time of year. I know that resolutions can be hollow. They can be self-loathing. They can be shallow and lazy. I know. I know. But I like setting intentions. I NEED to review and reassess periodically, to look back at my life and say, “Yeah, actually, I feel pretty good about this. I want more of this. I want less of this.” I want to live less on autopilot, and more on the guiding of my intentions and intuition.
No, in all the years that I have set the intention of publishing another book, I haven’t yet completed that task. So this is the time to ask myself Why, and to check in about what keeps me from it. Is it procrastination? Laziness? Fear? Lack of self-confidence? Has it simply not been time for this project to be born?
I am happy to live my life somewhat haphazardly. It fits my nature. I’m a Leo, subject to the shifting fires of my creative ideas. I am an Enneagram Seven, enthusiastically picking up the next fun thing. A sanguine personality that flits like a butterfly between beautiful flowers. I need the freedom to pursue the passion of the moment in order to fuel my creative fires, but I can get lost (SO LOST) in the woods. So it helps to have a plan. And these moments in the turning of the Wheel, no matter how random or purposeful, offer me the chance to stop and breathe and look around before taking the next leap.
I do this with a look of deep compassion at the woman who has been holding on and swimming for survival for the past two years, and even finding some joy and hope in the midst of the angst and worry and rage. I HAVE been moving toward becoming my best self in the past two years, but I’ve been in survival mode, and I want to use the gravity of this moment to help gain momentum to move onward with intention and out of some of the ruts which I have fallen into.
So, here are some loose, but thoughtfully processed, intentions for 2022: 1. To breathe and stretch and move mindfully each day. Movement will mostly mean walking, and that will depend on how my feet feel. But I am going to keep the intention. 2. To continue shifting my morning habits to get back to more writing. (Oooh, that’s pretty loosely worded, but it’ll do to kick me out of the starting gate). 3. I’m still assessing my social media use. At this point, it’s a loose intention to be on the phone less. I’ve self-soothed a lot in recent months with daily puzzles (Sudoku and Blockdoku and a Scrabble-style Word game). Facebook and Instagram are also major self-soothers. I feel like the connections have been crucial mental health survival assistance during the pandemic, but now it is time establish new habits, to breathe into new changes. 4. To bring back writing and creative projects as my primary soothers. 5. To give myself grace, and grace, and more grace. To turn my compassionate eye toward myself with more intention. 6. To ask for help. This may be the year I actually find a therapist or life coach or spiritual director who can help me sort out some of the inner tangles.
Gratitude List: 1. Intentions 2. Purple hair. Weirdly, it has lifted my spirits. 3. The earnest goofiness of squirrels 4. A Clean Slate, A Fresh Page, Tabula Rasa 5. Creative Projects May we walk in Beauty!
Honoring Kwanzaa with those who celebrate it: Today’s Principle in the Kwanzaa celebration is Kuumba: Creativity.
“I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child—What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.” —Michelle Obama, Becoming
“The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day. Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.” —Diane Ackerman
A string of beads has a thread running through all the beads, keeping them together. What we need is a thread too—of sanity and stability. Because when you have a thread, even though each bead is separate, they hang together.” —Sogyal Rinpoche
“Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.” (From the Talmud)
“The earth has music for those who listen.” —George Santayana
“By our love and our need for love we become for one another midwives of the true self.” —James Finley
“Civility will not overturn the patriarchy.” —Mona Eltahawy
“The opposite of poverty is not wealth. The opposite of poverty is justice.” —Bryan Stevenson
“Aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been.” ―David Bowie
“In a political culture of managed spectacles and passive spectators, poetry appears as a rift, a peculiar lapse, in the prevailing mode. The reading of a poem, a poetry reading, is not a spectacle, nor can it be passively received. It’s an exchange of electrical currents through language.” ―Adrienne Rich, 1993
“A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you… where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.” ―Adrienne Rich
“More firebrand women. More dragon spirited women. More loud women. More angry women. More hard women. More intimidating women. More history-making women. More rebel women. More rebel women. More rebel women.” ―Nikita Gill
“In the teaching of history, there should be no undue emphasis upon one’s own country. The history of wars should be a small part of what is taught. Much the more important part should be concerned with progress in the arts of civilisation. War should be treated as murder is treated. It should be regarded with equal horror and with equal aversion. It will be said that boys under such a regimen will be soft and effeminate. It will be said that they will lose the manly virtues and will be destitute of courage. And all this will be said by Christians in spite of Christ’s teaching.
But, dreadful as it may appear, boys brought up in the old way will grow into quarrelsome men who will find a world without war unbearably tame. Only a new kind of education, inculcating a new set of moral values, will make it possible to keep a peaceful world in existence. In the future there will, after all, be plenty of opportunity for adventure, even dangerous adventure. Boys can go to the Antarctic for their holidays, and young men can go to the moon. There are many ways of showing courage without having to kill other people, and it is such ways that should be encouraged.” ―Bertrand Russell,
“Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part.” ―John Lewis
On this day when everyone’s attempting to solve and re-solve their solutions, to resolve their resolutions, to tend to their intentions, I’m still waiting on a word. I watch my dreams and inner questions until the shining sixth, Epiphany, until the kings come. Wise ones. Mages. The light pours in on Epiphany and wisdom comes to the house.
It doesn’t really matter which day you embark on the journey. It only matters that you take it. Today we stand with Janus in his doorway, looking back and looking forward. With the double-faced god beside us, we can simultaneously look behind to the road that has brought us here, and ahead to the road we’re soon to take.
How could I live the coming year without that knowledge of the shadow that travels behind me, the road I walked to get here, the person I have been? It’s so easy, when we turn over a new leaf marking a new season in our lives, to simply yank the leaf from its twig, but the what-will-be is built upon the what-was. The new self which is emerging only arrived at this doorway on the persistent legs of the self which brought me here.
Whether you are waiting, like me, for Wisdom to come on Epiphany, or whether you step away from the door this morning to begin the journey of the year, this is the season of the set intention, the forward-moving affirmation. This is the time of the tabula rasa, the blank page upon which you can write whatever you choose.
Do you have a resolution for the coming year? A re-solution, perhaps, to an old and persistent problem? Or perhaps you need this official moment to end a habit that has you in a rut? Or to begin a new one that will get you traveling a more liberating and exciting road than the one you’ve become accustomed to walking? Many people I know prefer to call it an intention rather than a resolution. Perhaps an unachieved intention sounds less like a broken promise than an unsolved resolution.
The road to February is littered with broken resolutions and lost intentions, with holy words discarded and new habits jettisoned as old habits creep from the undergrowth and reattach themselves. I don’t think this means we shouldn’t set intentions or resolutions. Perhaps we need to set the intention and then set a second intention: To tend the first. If I set the intention to get 7,000 steps a day, and I succeed for a week or two, but then fall away, I will have had a less sedentary week or two. That’s a good thing. The idea, then, is to come back to it. Perhaps 7,000 is too much to ask, amid all the other things I need to accomplish. So maybe I re-set my intention and say 5,000 steps a day during the weekday, and 7,000 on weekends. And I try again, with fresh will and determination. After all, February first is another new beginning.
And I think we need to take great care in the intentions we set. If I decide that I don’t like the way I look these days, so I am going to whip my body into shape by diet and exercise, that’s a punishing resolution. My body is going to rebel, and the deep-self is going to feel attacked. But the fact is that for my whole life, I have needed to keep re-setting the intention to move more, and to maintain a healthier balance of the foods I eat. I don’t believe in self-denial. I will never entirely give up chocolate or ice cream or cookies, because then I am bound for failure. But I can probably re-set some of my boundaries with the sweet things. Slow down and savor.
Now there’s a good intention for experiencing life in 2020: Slow down and savor.
In the coming year, may you be kind to yourself. May you set reasonable goals that help you meet with success and fulfillment. May you bring out the best you, informed by all the versions of yourself that you have been. May you not jettison old versions of yourself along the trail behind you, but transform yourself in ways that acknowledge all the work you’ve done to get here.
Blessing for the New Year by Beth Weaver-Kreider
May you be born fresh and shining into the new year and may the old you continue, too, a thread that ties you to past versions of your truest self, for we need to be constantly reborn while we hold a deep sense of the shape we create in the universe.
Gratitude List: 1. All the birdlife of yesterday! It felt like we were in a legend. Suddenly, after weeks of very little bird activity, there were birds everywhere: bluebirds on the wires, finches and sparrows at the feeders with juncoes and mourning doves catching the windfall below, woodpeckers rowing through the space between trees. On the road, flocks of little birds schooled from grove to grove of roadside trees. Vultures, and maybe an eagle, hung in the updrafts above the Susquehanna. And a kingfisher chattered on Fishing Creek. 2. A good, hard hike/climb on the Mason-Dixon Trail south of Long Level. The trail rises above the river on a steep rocky ridge climb, and you’re on a dragon’s back of up-jutting rocks for a quarter mile or more, the river flowing wide like a lake on your left, and Fishing Creek rushing rapidly down the steep ravine to your right. 3. The hike reminded me of the moment in Prince Caspian when the children and Trumpkin are walking along the gorge, trying to find their way, and Aslan appears to Lucy. She must make a choice to follow him rather than going the way the others are going. She knows what is right, and she must follow that way, even when the others mock her for seeing things they cannot see. Even though he doesn’t say it at that moment in that book, I still heard him say, “Courage, Dear Heart” as we picked our way along the stony pathway. I’ll take that with me into the New Year. 4. We meant to go to Infinito’s for their pizza bar for supper last night, but they had closed early for the holiday. Instead, we went next door to Asian Yummy, and it was beautiful as well as yummy. 5. Again, as I feel the sadness and loss of these long mornings for writing and thinking, I can only be grateful for the gift of them in this Time out of Time. While I have not made headway on any projects in particular, I have stretched my writing/thinking muscles on the blog, and it has been satisfying and fortifying.
May we walk in Beauty!
Last January, I had repeated visitations from kingfisher, in waking life, in dreams, in conversations, in books. I chose kingfisher as one of my symbols for the year. Yesterday, as we were finishing our hike, climbing down the ridge toward Fishing Creek, where it moves slowly in deep pools before rushing down the ravine, we heard a kingfisher chattering in the hollow, over and over again. When I got home, inspired by a friend who is writing Shadormas, I wrote this two-stanza shadorma (3/5/3/3/7/5):
Kingfisher, who visited me at the start of the year chattered farewell to the year this cold afternoon.
And vulture floated like eagle through currents o’er the ridge while last year’s waters flowed down the Susquehanna.
Dreamwork: I don’t have much to say about last night’s busy anxiety dreams. In the dream, there is some sort of educational conference going on. It is both at my school, and not at my school. I go into a room, meaning to climb the stairs and go up a few floors, but it’s kind of Escher-like in design. I climb a flight of stair, walk along a landing, and the next flight leads down again into the same room, though I don’t really remember stepping down. Someone tells me I need to find the secret door on the landing. After that it’s possible to find stairs that go up, but each leads to an identical room with the same weird stair situation.
At one point, my colleagues are walking through my bedroom, and I say, “It wouldn’t be so bad if I felt this tired at the end of the day, but I feel like this right after waking up!”
Another of my colleagues, who retired a few years ago, is there, and he has brought his pet echidna. It’s really quite curious and adorable. It keeps sort of morphing into a puppy.
Perhaps I do need to pay attention to the exhaustion bit in here, and the confusion of stairs.
Here we are at Janus’ Doorway again. Janus, remember, is the two-faced Roman god who stands in doorways and gateways and openings, his face looking back to where he came from and forward to where he is headed. And on this day we, too, have made a practice of looking forward as we look back: What do I hold in my heart from the past year? What do I want to keep and improve upon? What do I regret? What do I leave behind with relief? And: What am I looking forward to? What do I want to maintain as the thread that continues from year to year to year? What do I want to pick up What can I strive to become as I step through this gate into the next phase?
Some years I make Resolutions. Some years I eschew them. Some years I make them with qualifications or new names like Intentions or Principles. This year, they’re Resolutions again. I can sit with that. Some of these are loftier than others.
Resolutions In 2019, I resolve to:
Continue banning face and name of the attention-monger on my FB page. No posts of him.
Nourish my body with care, and make sure to strengthen and stretch.
Tend to my inner life with even greater care. Expand spiritual practices and lifelines.
Let the madwoman out of the attic. Give her flowers and colors, nice music and rich scents.
Be actively kinder to my children.
Finish the book. Can I finish the book this year? I think maybe I can finish the book.g
Gratitude List: 1. Closing the book on the challenges of 2018. 2. Opening a new chapter. 3. Blank pages. 4. Supportive, overlapping circles of community. 5. The blue of those clouds on this first morning of the new year.
May we walk in Beauty!
Today’s Quotations list is long. I decided to include two of my own New Year’s poems.
Words for the Seventh Day of Kwanzaa: The word for this last day of Kwanzaa is Imani, or Faith. Believe that your dreams have the power to create change in the world. May it be so for you and for me and for all who long for and work for justice in the coming year.
“Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, Whispering ‘it will be happier.’” —Alfred Tennyson
“Darkness deserves gratitude. It is the alleluia point at which we learn to understand that all growth does not take place in the sunlight.” ―Joan Chittister
Walking Through the Gateway of Another Year
By Beth Weaver-Kreider, 2017
Let’s call them New Year’s Revolutions
or Re-Solutions
or Revelations
or Re-evaluations.
Change. Progress.
Uncovering. Assessing.
In the coming year, I resolve to re-solve my problems and issues every day, not just on this morning.
For every morning is the morning
of a whole new year,
a bright blank page
in which any thing
can be a new thing.
Let every moment be a moment like now, when the newborn sun shines over the ridge onto the scarlet breast of a cardinal, and the eye for a moment sees nothing but sparkling red.
“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.” —T. S. Eliot
“And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.”
—William Blake
“I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.” ―Mary Oliver
“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
This is How It Begins (a New Year’s poem) by Beth Weaver-Kreider, January 1, 2016
This is how it begins:
each year, each week, each day,
each golden shining drop of moment
approaches,
full of expectancy,
dawning,
ready for our use.
How will I inhabit the house
of the now that approaches?
How will I wear the cloth
of the day that is given?
How will I wander the story
of the year that has just now
leapt into shining view
through the gray clouds of winter?
I will face this year with resolution
(this week, this day, this moment)
not to wait until this whirling planet
has danced around the sun
to make the new thing new,
but to step into each freshly-birthed now
with eyes that see the golden shine of possibility
and ears that hear the note of each plucked strand of moment.
This is how it begins:
each year, each week, each day,
each golden shining drop of moment
approaches,
full of expectancy,
dawning,
ready for our use.
How will I inhabit the house
of the now that approaches?
How will I wear the cloth
of the day that is given?
How will I wander the story
of the year that has just now
leapt into shining view
through the gray clouds of winter?
I will face this year with resolution
(this week, this day, this moment)
not to wait until this whirling planet
has danced around the sun
to make the new thing new,
but to step into each freshly-birthed now
with eyes that see the golden shine of possibility
and ears that hear the note of each plucked strand of moment.
Dew on Mullein.
Gratitude List: 1. Yesterday, the family together celebrating a woman of wisdom and compassion. Some families celebrate the New Year. We celebrate a birthday.
2. More conversations with the beloved community, with wise parents and in-laws and out-laws. How listening well and sharing ideas becomes more than the sum of all the conversational bits that appear. How ideas build upon ideas, and shape the ones that came before, and open up spaces for new thoughts to appear. How iron sharpens iron. How certain conversations at certain moments prepare me to do the Work that approaches.
3. Three golden rays of sun yesterday before the sun set, shooting through a rift in the grey cloud. The sun, the sun, the sun: I saw the sun! And now, here in the crisp morning, nothing but blue above, and golden shine now slipping over the ridge and into the hollow.
4. I have been listening this week to Mindy Nolt’s Movers and Lovers, deeply and intensely, grateful for each phrase. Move. Love. Listen.
5. The Work. I am learning, slowly and in tiny little ways, to stop asking myself what I can get from each moment, but instead what my Work is here in the moment. And realizing, ever so dimly, that when I am really doing my Work (really doing my Work), I am also receiving what I need.
May we–in each dawning moment of this coming year and week and day–walk in Beauty!
My holiday season is Twelvenight, the time that stretches from Christmas to Epiphany, a quiet and contemplative time, time out of time, intended for the gleaning of images and words that might help me focus the unfolding of my story in the coming year. I extend the season a little, beginning at Solstice. Through the long nights and the waiting for light to begin to return, I watch and listen for images and words that compel me in some particular way.
Two years ago, I found myself suddenly obsessing over the word palimpsest, a strange and new word that carried the sense of layers and shadings of meaning, of old stories suddenly appearing in the middle of new stories to inform the current living.
Last year, bridge was my word–an image that appeared repeatedly to me in conversations and dreams, and a concept that became incredibly powerful to me in the meaning-making of my own life when I found myself suddenly making a major life transition, from farm and child care back to teaching.
My grab bag of images and ideas this year is full and cluttered. Fred the cat has been in one of his agitated cycles during the past couple of weeks, frequently waking us up in the middle of the night, which leaves my head whirling with fog-skuthers of dream-images, compelling pictures that slip into my thinking space throughout the day. I woke up one morning thinking about a student at our school, wondering if she would be in my class next semester, with an almost wild sense of protectiveness for her. Vulture, lynx, and leopard have appeared in my dreams. Plantain and pigweed. Storytellers, fools, and shamans (somehow associated with the image of those magical folk from the east who decided to follow the sign of a star). There was even a nightmare about watching a plane crash that woke me up with a pounding heart and tight breathing. The dreams have been full and fantastical.
Out of it all, I have settled on two words that have floated to the surface of the pond of my unconscious: secrets and impeccability. I don’t really like the word secrets (I have seen unhealthy secrets destroy relationships too often), and I keep trying to change it to mysteries, but something in me thinks that the distinction may be important to explore during the coming season, particularly in the context of the word impeccability. Perhaps it’s a step in gaining wisdom and maturity, that ability to keep one’s own council and trusting to the strength of one’s own character. I know I have much to learn on both fronts.
Blessings on your new year. Here is a little something:
So much there is
that cannot be told,
so much to unfold,
so many new meanings to try.
So much there is
that waits in the wings,
so many things
cannot find their sky,
that minuscule patch
of impossible blue
beyond the shadows
of this darkened room.
So many stories
have yet to be told,
so many adventures
of boldness to tell,
to live, to explore.
Open the windows,
pick up the pen,
and then tell me more,
tell me more,
tell me more!
So here we are again, dancing on the edge of the cliffs, Fools that we are, watching the sun set on an old year and rise on a new one. Like Janus the Roman god, two-faced, we look back at what has been and look forward to what will be, simultaneously embodying the present moment.
What amazing creatures we are, Bright Ones! We carry within us this unbounded capacity for hope and healing, for starting again at tabula rasa, that old blank slate. Oh, the old stuff lingers, like those lines of ancient vellum documents that re-appear after they’ve been scraped clean and re-written, ghosts of past that linger, but don’t overpower the new text.
One of my first remembered dreams of 2013 was a word rather than an image, the word Palimpsest, the term to describe those old re-used vellum texts that have given scholars the delight of being able to research two texts in one. I won’t deny that this past year’s fresh text has had its bumpy bits, its painful plot twists at times, but there has been so much light and love, there have been so many epiphanies and mountain views, so many new friends and thoughts and ideas.
(In these twelve nights of Yuletide, I have again been listening more acutely to my dreams. So far, the thing that stands out most clearly is something vague about The Wild Boys of Raccoon Hollow. I’m not feeling the spiritual depth of that one just yet. I’ll keep listening.)
Thank you, Bright Ones, for sharing the journey, for reading my lines here and there. I wish you many bright spots of sunlight on your path, and challenges enough to make you know your true strength. Oh, and dreams that give you vision for the next step.
Gratitude List: 1. This phrase that someone used today: “The intimate magic of motherhood.” Isn’t that satisfying?
2. Joseph Brodsky, and Alex Estes’ review of his “1-Jan-65” poem. It enlivens the literary critic within me.
3. Knowing my work. Refining the vision.
4. All that we have been and all that we will be, but mostly, who we are right in this exact moment.
5. I have said it before, but it bears repeating on the cusp of the New Year: You. Oh, Bright Ones, You.
I have already received a private message from a friend who wrote a marvelous Palimpsest poem. Feel free to type in your own in the comments or on my FB thread, or in my email or FB messages. Here’s mine (the phrases on the right-hand side are random quotes pulled out of my Facebook archive):
The fiery sunset of the old year gives way to
salt. . .balsam. . .ratatat cat feet. . .green
a silver gibbous moon gives way to
not sure the sun is ever coming back
this rosy sun shining through a gull’s wing.
too many trinkets in the trees already
This new morning climbs down the northward hill,
a new bubble wand and a madcap two-year-old
washes the fields above the orchard in golden glow,
can’t get enough mulberries
slips downward into the frosty pear trees,
amazing person, that cat
illuminates the weather vane rooster on the roof,
my brain is filled with compost and my poetry is green
Blessings on your new year. Here is a little something:
So here we are again, dancing on the edge of the cliffs, Fools that we are, watching the sun set on an old year and rise on a new one. Like Janus the Roman god, two-faced, we look back at what has been and look forward to what will be, simultaneously embodying the present moment.
Mockingbird Chronicles 