It's A Start

I want to lose about twenty pounds (whether I need to lose that much is open to lively and compassionate debate, but there you are. If you haven’t yet, please find Anne Lamott on Facebook and read her recent advice on making a new year’s dieting resolution).

(I’ll wait).

I also want less stuff in our home, to twist grapevines into wreaths as I walk the land and to have a downstairs guest room that doesn’t look like the staging area for a perpetual rummage sale.

And I want peace. Peace, for God’s sake. Everywhere there is violence and horror, peace. Please. I can’t shout or whisper that often enough.

In some perspectives and traditions, the new year is still months away, signaled by the spring equinox and all living things making good on their promise to keep throwing offspring in every direction they can. I lean more toward that approach, all the while marking my days by a calendar that marches forward in semesters and holidays and some rather creative “national” observances (did you know that September 19 is National Talk Like a Pirate Day? Save the date and get out that eye patch). As I try to reconcile those two disparate realities in my existence, my money is still on the whole new life and beginnings connection, both of which are thin on the (frozen) ground at the moment. I’ll put on my party hat once I see that first dandelion in the front yard.

The view over my shoulder is a flip book story with some of the pages in tatters. If someone had told me back in July when everything hit the fan that I’d be head-over-heels in love with a new job an hour’s commute away from the most beautiful place on earth and my husband would be learning to walk again and we’d both be sitting here on the crumbling ledge of 2023 marveling at our collective resilience, I’d have sent them and their madness packing. And yet, here we are on another New Year’s Eve together, fresh from a trip to Costco for more butter and pecans and a stop at a most darling music box-and-antiques shop we haven’t visited since before lockdown (the new eternal marker of pre and post everything in our lives now), two trays of vanilla chai breathing their clove and cardamom goodness across the living room. Did this past summer’s challenges even happen at all?

Sometimes when I’m walking the land, I’ll turn a curved corner into the next leg of the path through the field and just stop, asking the sky, how did I get here? An inquiry that’s both literal and contemplative, it slows me down enough to sundial on the spot where I stand, look around and take it All In—the trees (towering elders and spindly saplings, each of them stunning and sentient in all seasons), the tracks in the mud that are not my own, deep red and edible rosehips on the slender tips of vines whose thorns will humble you. I remember leaving out the back door of the mud room some twenty minutes before and suddenly I’m walking parallel to the woods, my toe catching the exposed roots of a teenaged cottonwood. Or I was minding my own business at age twenty-five, happily single and now I’m looking at a wedding album that’s thirty years old, Patrick’s name next to mine on the cover. How did I get here? The answer is eternally elastic: One step at a time.

To look at the whole of one’s journey from a broad and dizzying vantage point is at once affirming and terrifying, but how can we look away? I think we know we’re more—a LOT more—than the sum of our experiences. Life seems more complicated now, or maybe I was just naive all those decades ago. I brood more, worry and wring my hands too much and pray for everyone a lot. I also laugh with abandon, those rich hearty belly laughs that make full use of every muscle in my face. I sing on key in the shower (mostly Billy Joel, Dan Fogelberg and of course, Sting), lick peanut dipping sauce off my fingers when we make those fantastic chard-wrapped vegan spring rolls of ours and sift through stacks of colorful paper and other materials I’ve scavenged to make into blank journals. I have no idea what my life will be like on the next New Year’s Eve. If I think about that too much, I’ll unsettle myself and never fall asleep.

So here I sit in the early days of winter, pointing my heart’s compass toward a spring guaranteed to none of us, betting against despair and browsing the pages of seed catalogues like everything will come to us in time. Headlines overwhelm, there are always more questions than answers and sometimes we pay bills a few days late. We move forward anyway, pulled into each moment by a humming purpose that bewilders and delights us with its patient clarity. I can’t say for certain where we’re going but I know I must keep walking.

On the path in the field, I stop, place my hand over my heart and breathe. It’s a start.