January is nearly over…the beginning days of another year. The marking of a new year comes with a certain promise that people embrace in a variety of ways. Resolutions come to mind. Those promises we make to ourselves to do things differently…try something new…change…let go…take on…forgive…reshape…re-create. It is difficult to allow the flipping over of the calendar to a new year without making a silent or verbal assent to make this year better than the last. Perhaps it is ingrained in us to do this. Certainly our culture encourages this behavior. The messages and signs are all around us and it becomes big business as the ball is dropped and the minutes flow from one year to the next.

It really is about marking beginnings, isn’t it? And yet we need not wait for the year to move from one to the next to embrace the power of what it means to begin. I was reminded of a small book I have had for a long time simply entitled Always We Begin Again. It is an updated primer in the way of Saint Benedict by John McQuiston II. For some reason as I felt this January slip away into the shortest month of February, the title of this book came to my mind. In pulling it off my shelf I read these words:

At the beginning of each day, 
after we open our eyes
to receive the light
of that day,

As we listen to the voices
and sounds 
that surround us,

We must resolve to treat each hour 
as the rarest of gifts,
and be grateful
for the consciousness
that allows us to experience it,
recalling in thanks
that our awareness is a present
from we know not where,
or how, or why.

This bent toward marking our beginnings is available to us at the beginning of every day, perhaps even at the beginning of every breath.We need not wait for the turning of the year. Each day represents a beginning that has never been before. The gratitude of consciousness in recognizing the power of it is nothing to be squandered. And yet I know I do. I have a sense I am not alone in this. Opening our eyes to receive the light…the precious light…of a new day is a gift to be savored and celebrated. And yet I forget. My hand reaches for the coffee and my mind begins to immediately make the lists of things I must do, should do. I rarely take the time to savor the beauty and the mystery of it.

For a few years during the first days of a new year I have created a practice of placing paper white bulbs in water and placing them near a window on my kitchen table. I watch them in their beginning as the days of the new year emerge. Slowly their roots reach down into the water as their bodies reach toward the light. It is a visual reminder of how beginnings work. Always…always…some bulbs grow quickly while others stay in their round, brown form holding onto their inner greenness as long as they can. Eventually all will blossom into tiny, fragile, fragrant flowers, a testament to a spring life that is doing its own waiting before it is time to begin. I do not understand why there is such a variation in their emerging. Someone wiser than I may have the answer to this question but I simply believe that some things simply take more time to root, grow and blossom. It is perhaps as true for the two legged as it is for plants and other growing things.

The light that graces our days is beginning to grow and the darkness is retreating. In just a few weeks we will see the snow begin to melt and the ice become a memory. It will signal an ending to winter and the emergence of warmth that seems now but a dream. In both the endings and the beginnings we are invited to ‘treat the hour as the rarest of gifts’ and to allow gratitude to bubble up like a refreshing…unfrozen…spring. Always we begin again.

My mother used to tell the story of a child who cried so hard when the family was going to take down their Christmas tree that the parents relented and left it up till spring. (This child was not me!) It seems to me each time we passed their house she told that story. I am sure that is not the case but it is how I remember it. I have thought of that child, that house, several times over the last week. Though I have not been reduced to tears at the prospect of taking down my tree, I have chosen to let it stand and turn the lights on every morning when I get up. It is still dark outside so it brings that little thrill of light that happened the first time the lights lit up the limbs of this sweet evergreen that has accompanied my family through the holidays. Morning and night the lights are burning.The lights bring such warmth and joy in the midst of the frigid cold and the gray days. Why rush getting rid of that brilliant sight?

This past week a poem by Jane Kenyon came to me in two different emails. Its title says it all…Taking Down the Tree

“Give me some light!” cries Hamlet’s
uncle midway through the murder
of Gonzago. “Light! Light!” cry scattering
courtesans. Here, as in Denmark,
it’s dark at four, and even the moon
shines with only half a heart.

The ornaments go down into the box:
the silver spaniel, My Darling
on its collar, from Mother’s childhood
in Illinois; the balsa jumping jack
my brother and I fought over,
pulling limb from limb. Mother
drew it together again with thread
while I watched, feeling depraved
at the age of ten.

With something more than caution
I handle them, and the lights, with their
tin star-shaped reflectors, brought along
from house to house, their pasteboard
toy suitcases increasingly flimsy.
Tick, tick, the desiccated needles drop.

By suppertime all that remains is the scent
of balsam fir. If it’s darkness
we’re having, let it be extravagant.

It really is about the light and the desire to have more of it. And, I believe, the inner push to keep it up also is about all the memories that hang on its branches. Ornaments that offer up little messages from years and years of gifts received and collecting. They stand as a monument to certain parts of life and the fact that a person thought of someone in our family enough to choose an ornament that would travel through months and years… even if we don’t remember the giver. But that is not really the case. Each year as I lift a fragile creation from its eleven month home in the attic, I recount how each one came to find a few weeks stay on the tree. There is one ornament I cherish, given to me by a five year old girl, who is now an adult, a mother and yet when I pull that ornament out of the box I always send a little photo of it to her reminding her of the sweet child she was. 

Decorating the Christmas tree has many layers of meaning.It carries the traditions that have lived in a house and those that perhaps so longer find room there. Taking it down signals an ending of one year and the beginning of another. And sometimes we are just not ready for the letting go, for the energy needed to begin the newness that is calling. 

Eventually I will take the tree down. I will tuck the ornaments safely back into their little compartments in the red and green plastic box that keeps them safe and ready for next year. But I may just hold onto some of the lights and drape them over the mantel so I can yell out like Hamlet’s uncle: “Give me some light!” It seems a good thing to do until the light outside begins to grow and shed some warmth once again. Seems like a plan to me.