Tag Archives: New Year’s Day

100 degrees, oldest to youngest.

family, nature, travel, , , , , , , ,

In Wisconsin, where I spent the holiday with my oldest daughter Pearl, we had a freezing Christmas, with unexpected light snow. I’d never experienced subzero temperatures before; when I came out of church on Christmas Day my cheeks seemed to stiffen within a minute.

The view from the big breakfast room windows was soothingly white and still, until we let Dog Jack run out to exult in the snow by rolling in it and barking the announcement of joy to the neighborhood.

I was slated to travel from Pearl’s to visit my youngest daughter Kate, and a couple of days before that journey my son-in-law noticed on the weather page that it was 100 degrees hotter at my destination than at their house at that moment. So warm… because Kate lives and works with her husband Tom in India — and now here I am in India, too!

It’s not a country that I ever had any desire to visit, and even after I bought my plane ticket, it was only the thought of seeing my dear daughter that overcame my aversion to the dehumanizing strain of traveling to the other side of the globe.

From Chicago I flew to Toronto, and then on to Mumbai, or Bombay, spending 15 hours on that last leg of my journey. Some of you have heard me tell of my anxiety about that long long flight, but I have to admit that it wasn’t really bad! As soon as I joined the group of people waiting to board Air Canada’s Boeing 777, nearly all Indian folk, I felt that I was part of a congenial and helpful community. I had a good seat on the aisle, the perfect seatmate, and they fed us three comforting Indian meals.

Daughter Pippin had given me a splendid neck pillow designed for air travel, and it worked so well, I slept three times during that period that was like a time out of time, crossing about ten time zones and being carried into the future, and into another world.

I’ll be here several weeks, where winter temperatures range from approximately 60-90 degrees. I’m really happy to miss out on the dark days of a more northern January this year, though Bombay’s air quality is so bad — 195 on the index my first day — that the light is blocked out somewhat.

I have been busy these first three days of my stay with Kate and Tom, with just a minimum of minutes in which to scribble a few notes on things I don’t want to forget. I hope I can write here about some of the thousand things that have impressed me so far, and the experiences I have yet to encounter in this vibrant land.

But for now, I just wanted to check in,
and also to wish you a blessed new year of 2018!

 

[To continue reading posts about India, scroll down a little to the link “Bombay Baby” with its arrow pointing to the right, and click on that. Continue in that way at the bottom of each post. There is only one in the string of 23 posts over seven weeks that is not specifically about India.]

What honesty reveals of mystery…

poetry, quotes, reality, , , ,

I read a list “of the best poems for New Year,” and Christina Rossetti’s “Old and New Year Ditties” was among them. The second stanza reads:

New Year coming on apace
What have you to give me?
Bring you scathe, or bring you grace,
Face me with an honest face;
You shall not deceive me:
Be it good or ill, be it what you will,
It needs shall help me on my road,
My rugged way to heaven, please God.

This reminded me of a prayer that we pray at every Divine Liturgy, “All things good and profitable for our souls, let us ask of the Lord.” When we realize that as the poet says, whatever comes our way has the potential to “help me on my…rugged way to heaven,” even what is “ill” is transformed.

That isn’t to deny the “honest face” we need to have in ourselves, and which some part of us longs for from everything and everyone we encounter in life. Fr. Alexander Schmemann said, “If there are two heretical words in the Christian vocabulary, they would be ‘optimism’ and ‘pessimism.’ These two things are utterly anti-biblical and anti-Christian.” What we need is reality, the reality that “Our faith is not based on anything except on these two fundamental revelations: God so loved the world, and: The fallen world has been secretly, mysteriously redeemed.”(From the lecture “Between Utopia and Escape.”)

As we face the gifts of the new year 2017, may God’s grace flow through each one. My love goes out to you all!

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so this is the sound of you

church, poetry,

To the New Year

With what stillness at last
you appear in the valley
your first sunlight reaching down
to touch the tips of a few
high leaves that do not stir
as though they had not noticed
and did not know you at all
then the voice of a dove calls
from far away in itself
to the hush of the morning
so this is the sound of you
here and now whether or not
anyone hears it this is
where we have come with our age
our knowledge such as it is
and our hopes such as they are
invisible before us
untouched and still possible

— W.S. Merwin


Seek God, and live!
May you feel His blessing every day.

 

New Year’s Gifts

housework, poetry,

“I don’t like my life!” This surprising phrase repeatedly ran through my mind before Christmas. Egads, how could I be thinking something so discontented?

Was it just a variation on “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel!”? Maybe. Or, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” And along more housewifely lines, “I can’t concentrate on anything productive because the house is so messy!” and even more specifically, realities like, “I want to write, but I can’t find my notebook.”

This new year has started off with a broken computer–an inconvenience that brings gifts: I am forced out of my routine, or rut, and get a boost toward a possibly more likeable life. The other gift is a son with a computer, newly arrived here, so that if I really need to I can use his machine. We and the computer repairman can all relax over a long weekend.

Do the following fall within the definition of resolutions? My feelings don’t appear strong enough to be called resolve, but I do have general good intentions to improve on some things. A lot of the same old things, in fact, though the outward shapes of the projects are revised.

1. Finish making a bedroom into a sewing room.

2. Take the time to sort and organize notes about reading and writing in such a way that I can make use of them; this will require some purging!

3. Be very careful about accumulating any more possessions, because they will just take more of my time for maintenance, and then before I know it, more for sorting and purging.

The new year is a gift of hope. We commemorate the Circumcision of Christ today, which reminds us of God’s covenant with us–and there is no greater Hope! We can be assured that God will be with us, full of grace for every moment and every day we are given. It’s true, we can’t get it beforehand, but we can surely anticipate it.

This poem expressing the confusing natures of time and humankind is also a gift for today.

NEW YEAR’S

Let other mornings honor the miraculous.
Eternity has festivals enough.
This is the feast of our mortality,
The most mundane and human holiday.
On other days we misinterpret time,
Pretending that we live the present moment.
But can this blur, this smudgy in-between,
This tiny fissure where the future drips
Into the past, this fly-speck we call now
Be our true habitat? The present is
The leaky palm of water that we skim
From the swift, silent river slipping by.
The new year always brings us what we want
Simply by bringing us along–to see
A calendar with every day uncrossed,
A field of snow without a single footprint.

-Dana Gioia