After the upheaval of the past year — the personal, the collective, the political — I’m grateful for the turn of a calendar page, bringing a fresh tomorrow and a new year. It’s a chance to make whatever symbolic starts need to be made, and an excuse for a clean slate, even as the same sun rises over the same horizon, over the same cityscape dotted with construction cranes … and the same swirling skies of pigeons and crows and starlings.
“The most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something — an object or ourselves — and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force.” That’s how anthropologist Ernest Becker concludes his book on life, death, humanity. And, it’s the last book I’ll have half-read in 2018 unless Hugh’s dream of time travel comes to fruition.
I’m inspired by the stalwart people, the brilliant, creative, resolute people, who fashion something to drop “into the confusion,” as Becker writes. Thank you to everyone I’ve met along the way who’s had the courage to make that offering, to reimagine life in the face of the unimaginable, and help me do the same.
I hope the joys that painted your last year, seep into the canvas of the new year … and that January 1 brings a softer and sweeter spirit to soothe the many hardships and stresses of 2018. I wish everybody a healthy and fulfilling 2019, full of happiness and good fortune, but most of all, peace and healing in these uncertain times.
And as always, my coda:
A special plea for kindness toward to the four-leggeds among us — and to the flyers, the swimmers, and the crawlers who share this planet, doing their best to fashion their own somethings in the same life force as ours.
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