From Old to New
Burning The New Year
Naomi Shihab Nye
Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.
So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.
Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.
Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.
A beautiful poem and one that holds resonance to me. It’s been a year, hasn’t it? I find myself drawn to rituals and superstitions, perhaps a very human inclination during crisis and plague times. “What have I done, what have we done to displease the gods old and new?”
Perhaps nothing, is the problem, if you are an atheist leaning agnostic with a penchant for witchcraft but whose main spiritual path has been community, communication, communing. Hermes and Athena are the ones I turn to when I call upon spirit. A communicator, a herald and a wise woman warrior. Hermes is also a psycho-pomp, or a soul guider, which I am very fond of during darker times.
Humans make meaning. We are meaning makers. We can’t help ourselves. Three or four things happen in a row? We make up a story about it (never mind that there may not be a story there) but in making up the story, we create meaning and in a weird way, truth. We are in a story-telling time right now. Pandemics are real, they aren’t real, viruses are germs, they aren’t germs, freedom is being taken away, freedom is still there, vaccines will harm you, no-goddamn-it they won’t, masks are oppression, votes never happened, conspiritualists create one set of stories which in my opinion really set progress back (and they’d accuse me of…something because I oppose them) and the rest of us seem to be struggling to keep up with the boring old narrative of yore in response. Like, vaccines save lives, wearing masks is not an affront to one’s liberty, our democracy (while imperfect in a lot of ways) is valuable.
I can’t tell you how to fix this. I spend much of my dad wanting to yell at the internet, pound my head, and get into arguments, and then I spent the rest wondering what on earth can be done about mis-information campaigns that use cultic systems to create…what we are mired in. There are so many experts begging, screaming, writing, about how to fix this but I fear humanity is in the grip of a fever (two fevers) that will need to burn themselves out, even as many of us seek to create innoculations against this…shift.
So, I make my own meaning. And I err on the side of rituals when an auspicious day like New Years comes about.
I purify. I scrub the dead skin cells off and annoint myself with fine creams.
I adorn myself with fine clothes and colors imbued with meaning-red for passion, gold for luck, green for money.
I cook sweet foods to give thanks for the bounty we have had this year, against all odds. We drink sparkling drinks, liquids infused with stars.
We, my family and I, build a fire and toss in what we are letting go of and then…One kisses of course, if one can, on the ringing of the bells.
We eat black eyed peas, and greens, and cornbread as our southern ancestors have done for many decades.
Do a little bit of all the things you want to do each day, this year. Set the standard.
We hope, I hope, that our actions will please the gods old and news and ease the birth of a new, better more compassionate and rational year.
