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.