New Years Eve I sat with a friend at the kitchen table, in a ceremony to shape the story of the year past and the year to come. Tangerines, mochi and tea, candles to warm the light and help to shape a vaporous not-yet built future from our irresolute selves. She is considering leaving a house and a life of 33 years, I am more fully looking to own the life I have. We could learn much from the mollusks and the hermit crabs; it is hard to leave the shell of a house that no longer fits when a new one has not yet been found. Perhaps we needed candlelit moon shells, with their romantic arabesques, to thoroughly walk us into the space of new places made vacant and filled with possibility.
We wrote our intentions to invite and to abandon on two sides of a piece of paper and then (tried) to fold it into a boat. A British woman on Youtube gave directions, her words crisp as baking parchment. A paper boat: the simplest origami in the world. My friend’s came out fine, mine fell into a labyrinth of misdirection, a cross between a crushed lotus and a lizard, though it did catch fire later more easily, having many loose parts and stray corners to catch flame.
In my chagrin at my (7?) simple folds having been done incorrectly I remembered another holiday: a dark Wednesday afternoon in the Third Grade portables at Madrona Elementary. Our project was to understand the Felt Experience
of The Pilgrims & The Indians, in part by making a longhouse out of brown construction paper. I tried. I promise you I tried. All ardent impulses towards geometry devolved into something structurally insupportable, and the teacher paused beside my desk, waited an interminable beat, and lifted my construction into the air for the entire class to behold. “This girl,” she said, “did not follow directions.”
of The Pilgrims & The Indians, in part by making a longhouse out of brown construction paper. I tried. I promise you I tried. All ardent impulses towards geometry devolved into something structurally insupportable, and the teacher paused beside my desk, waited an interminable beat, and lifted my construction into the air for the entire class to behold. “This girl,” she said, “did not follow directions.”What ARE the instructions for the new year? You can say it is arbitrary, this naming of a particular day “Day 1”; you can say, I’ll declare my own, thank you very much, perhaps make it the end of Wassail, or just after Easter, when bunnygrass is on sale, or maybe after Mayday, when the bluebells have wilted and there are no excuses left. But I have believed in the power of January my whole life. . . and I’m not letting go. Janus: the God of beginnings and endings. He looks forward, and back, and he has a measuring cup. Show up. Drink in the possibility of the New.
When we were done writing what we were inviting in and what we were letting go we set our intentions on fire. What is your intention for the new year?
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