New Year's Eve

 

Vanessa Bowman

Maria Popova

Hindsight is our finest instrument for discerning the patterns of our lives. To look back on a year of reading, a year of writing, is to discover a secret map of the mind, revealing the landscape of living — after all, how we spend our thoughts is how we spend our lives.

What have I read this year?   I've re-read more things than I've read,  and re-listened to things that I've listened to many times over.

There are more, but I can't think of them at the moment.

As Maria Popova says, how we spend our thoughts is how we spend our lives.

So , what do I remember reading in the past 12 months?

Many New Yorker pieces, for sure.

Several pieces from The Atlantic, too.

What else?

Anyway, it's New Year's Eve, and I'm spending it at home. I was invited to a party, but one of the sisters here has RSV, and I don't want to take those viruses with me.

I had hoped to spend the day, a retreat day for the Daughters of Charity, meditating over this past year.

But one of our sisters had to be rushed to the hospital late last night, and the resulting activities here have kept me busy. She is 85 years old, and a very serious hoarder.  I won't go into the gory details here, but we've been cleaning out a small area of floor which was two feet deep in paper, shoes, cards, dirty clothes, etc.  And that was just a small part.  She will be in the hospital for a few days,  and we all dread her return here, when she sees that we've been intruding on her private space.  But when her private space is strewn with urine and feces, because she was so sick that she couldn't make it to the toilet, we really had to intrude on her private space. But enough on that.

Here's a poem by William Stafford:

Starting here, what do you want to remember?

How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?

What scent of old wood hovers, what softened

sound from outside fills the air?

 

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world

than the breathing respect that you carry

wherever you go right now? Are you waiting

for time to show you some better thoughts?

 

When you turn around, starting here, lift this

new glimpse that you found; carry into evening

all that you want from this day. This interval you spent

reading or hearing this, keep it for life –

 

What can anyone give you greater than now,

starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

 

by William Stafford

 

It's been a terrible year in the world, full of violence and war, the hateful politics of the Republicans, and the threat of Donald Trump.

Here's a wonderful poem from Richard Wilbur:

Year’s End

​

Now winter downs the dying of the year, ​ ​

And night is all a settlement of snow;

From the soft street the rooms of houses show ​ ​

A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere, ​ ​

Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin ​ ​

And still allows some stirring down within.

​

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake

The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell ​ ​

And held in ice as dancers in a spell ​ ​

Fluttered all winter long into a lake; ​ ​

Graved on the dark in gestures of descent, ​ ​

They seemed their own most perfect monument.

​

There was perfection in the death of ferns ​ ​

Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone ​ ​

A million years. Great mammoths overthrown ​ ​

Composedly have made their long sojourns, ​ ​

Like palaces of patience, in the gray

And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

​

The little dog lay curled and did not rise ​ ​

But slept the deeper as the ashes rose

And found the people incomplete, and froze ​ ​

The random hands, the loose unready eyes ​ ​

Of men expecting yet another sun

To do the shapely thing they had not done.

​

These sudden ends of time must give us pause. ​ ​

We fray into the future, rarely wrought

Save in the tapestries of afterthought.

More time, more time. Barrages of applause ​ ​

Come muffled from a buried radio.

The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

​

Richard Wilbur (1921 - 2017)

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