when you greet the new year, your very own, with a whisper not a bang. . .

by bam

fresh is the year, fresh as the newly-fallen tableau of snow. fresh as a bedsheet unwrinkled by the toss and turn of night. fresh, fresh, fresh. 

as with any wintry panorama, the horizonless plane is punctuated with little-noticed hideaways, nooks and crannies for peeking out unseen, for safe harbor within. one of those nooks of the new year, tucked in the shadows of the timpani of christmas, of hanukkah, of new year’s, is a nook all my own. i curl inside it, pulling taut the woolen spans within which i wrap myself. i am a child of the fresh new year. my begin-again in sync with that of time’s eternal ticking. 

i mark it devotedly, and by long-ago acquired habit, in some degree of solitude and silence.

it is my pianissimo of blessing. and it needs no accompaniment.

it’s one of a kind, yet not unlike any other.

i will never not celebrate the dawning of each new day. not ever. i live now in the land of gratitude and grace, where every day given is a welcomed bead of prayer answered, an unearned gift, on the abacus of joy. a whole new year is possibility, is joy, is grace, compounded and multiplied. it’s beyond measure, truly. i intend to spend it wisely.

nearly three years ago, in the wake of a surgery that had me calculating five-year-survival odds, sixty-nine seemed far beyond my reach. it was a sum i dared not count. though i wished mightily. prayed heartily. 

and now that it’s come, on the third of this new year, i welcome it between my double daily doses of tamiflu, the magic capsule meant to avenge the virus coursing through my achy hollows and my knotty sinew. 

instead of gathering tomorrow night round a table at a place hand-picked by my very own aficionado of chicago kitchens, it seems we’ll be gathered here at home (or at least the three-fourths of us now sharing iterations of influenza A). the yuletide tree still standing, still blinking like a night sky stitched with twinkling stars, it’s as cozy a place as i could ever dream. and i’m more than blessed to call it home.

looking back across the years, and all the january thirds, i count more than a handful spent under covers, a thermometer poking from my pucker. it seems the time of year when bugs catch up to me. knock me off my stride.

the lesson here is elementary, and not profound: what matters is not the way you spend a certain day, but how you enter into each and every one. 

and i am entering full of bliss. 

i know, and won’t forget, how priceless is each day; how not a one of these is to be assumed, presumed, taken for granted. 

my birthday gift, once again, is the gift i open every given day: this day, these beauties, these people i so dearly love; the sky that shifts from pink to peach to blue to gray to indigo; the stirrings of the critters who imprint their nighttime rustlings in the snow, or the birds who animate the winter boughs; and especially the quietude, the wintry quietude, that underscores it all—these are the wrappings of the shimmering at my deepest core, the against-all-odds chance to be alive here and now, to love and love some more, to bring some faint grain of blessedness to each and every day. 

for all of this, in any form, in every form, i bend my knees and bow: thank you, O Holy, Holy One, for the breath that animates and infuses, the breath that fills my heart and lungs with the inextinguishable, ineffable trace of You.

epiphany is the light shining in the not-so distance. may it cast its glow on our uncharted paths and illuminate our way….and may this new year bless all of us. deeply, contentedly, quietly.

what lights do you see in the not-so distance?