A little less than 48 hours ago, the calendar turned to a new number. Whether this is something to be heralded or dreaded depends on your perspective I suppose. It is safe to say that the last year, the last two years, have had challenges we never imagined, ones with which we are still reckoning. And so, to turn a new page can carry much…anticipation, fear, excitement, hope, so many emotions.
On December 31st, in preparing for a very quiet dinner to mark the ending of one year and the beginning of the next, I went searching my bookshelves for some words that might hold the evening and speak to the threshold on which we stood. Practically reaching out to me was a copy of the book Prayers for a Thousand Years, a collection of poems, prayers and writings for the new millennium. Remember that time? Talk about anticipation and standing in the ‘what next?’ of the uncertainty of what the next 100…1000… years might bring! Would all the technology we had come to depend upon be able to flip to the next page of the internal calendar that guided it? We filled our bathtubs with water. I can’t remember why we did that. The words collected for this book contained these by writer Ursula LeGuin. They seemed to fit the evening of this particular new year so I shared them at my dining room table.
Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well-loved one,
walk mindfully, well-loved one,
walk fearlessly, well-loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.
LeGuin’s writing is always filled with rich metaphor and so each reader will make sense of this in their own way. The part that reached out and tugged at my heart were the last ones. “Well-loved one”…a moniker to carry each of us into the certain uncertainty of 2022. If we can live in the knowledge that we are ‘well-loved’, we can, I believe, live this new year with a deep knowing that together we can weather whatever the year brings. Reaching out to offer love to others… who are equally loved though they may not always know it… holds the power to bring us to a place we have yet to imagine, a new beginning. This great love extends to the two-legged, the four-legged, those with wings and fins, those that crawl and slither and to the soil on which we all co-exist.
“Return with us, return to us, be always coming home.” Here’s to a new year, one that has never been before and will never be again. May we hold it gently and walk into it with compassion and care and a great love in which we are ‘always coming home.’
