Perhaps because I connect with my pagan roots, this day after the winter solstice, begins a new year for me.  

I’m on the ninth floor of an eleven story hotel looking out over Silicon Valley in the rain.

I wake at four and open Mary Oliver’s wonderful book, Owls and Other Fantasies, which I highly recommend.

She begins with this quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson from “May-Day”, which invites me to simmer in myself that perhaps each day is a day to ask, “May I”, as I feel into what answers my needs. 

Emerson:

Beloved of children, bards and Spring,

O birds, your perfect virtues bring.

Your song, your forms, your rhythmic flight,

Your manners for the heart’s delight.

Oliver’s whole book invites us into presence and the revelation of transformation that is death, but one essay in particular, “Bird” tells of her rescue of a gull, and what she, and therefore we, learn from the life and transition of this bird.  

Oddly, this posted first on my Breast Strokes blog. Perhaps, it, too, asks for acknowledgment and reception of light.

I woke this morning thinking of Richard Bach’s book Illusions and then drove to McGinnis to look for birds.  It was early and muddy and beautiful.

We’re getting our tree today.  The weather is crisp and clear.   

Holiday joy abounds as we expand in gratitude and connecting circles of grace. 

In December, my book group meets for an overnight in the city but, of course, with Covid changes, we didn’t meet last year, and now, today we are journeying to San Francisco for lunch.  We’ll take the ferry. I search for my Clipper cards and find four.   Then, I dress up, well I dress up for me, and put on clothes I haven’t worn in all this time.  Very exciting.

We never took our gatherings for granted, and yet, these days, there is an even more intense awareness of gratitude for ability, connection, togetherness,  and health.  

Emily Dickinson: Beauty is not caused. It is.