January 1, 2010
Friday

The idea that last night we stepped into a “new decade” of the “new century” took me by surprise. Suddenly I was seeing retrospectives of a whole ten years rather than just the past calendar year. I hadn’t thought of the approach of MMX as something  momentous, the way the messy MCMXCIX gave way to the spare and elegant MM. I guess I just don’t attach more significance to the turn of the pages this year than I have any other year. This is just life, and you keep on keepin’ on.

Nevertheless, I did take a look at where I was and what I was doing on 01-01-01. One of my Christmas gifts to myself that year was a leather cover for the Levenger Notabilia notebooks I liked. I had it monogrammed “MM,” for Maggy May. I felt a forward-moving energy for having the same nickname as the new millennium.

I had been online not even a year then with the original incarnation of this journal. In Ceremony, I quoted a rhyme my mother was fond of: A bayberry candle burned to the socket brings health to your body and wealth to your pocket. I offered a picture of the candle I’d used on New Year’s Eve. “We awoke to a misty moisty morning that felt more like a Sunday than a Saturday,” I wrote. “I read yet another editorial page diatribe about which century we might be in, and when I relighted the bayberry candle to photograph it, I wondered about the origin of my mother’s rhyme. It sounds vaguely 19th century American, but it could also be a remnant of her very distant Celtic past, roots so remote I doubt seriously my mother ever thought about them.”

In my paper journal I wrote out some of my favorite phrases for January:

From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere —
         — Richard Wilbur, b. 1921, American poet

. . .  the freshness of unclaimed surprises.
          — Joyce Rupp, b. 1943, American spiritual teacher and writer

. . . all the vacancies of January ahead.
            — Linda Pastan, b. 1932, American poet

The second half of my life will be ice breaking
up on the river, rain soaking the fields, a hand held out.
              — Joyce Sutphen, b. 1949, American poet

I look at that collection of possible epigraphs, of phrases to use to set the tone for this year. “All the vacancies of January ahead” doesn’t do anything for me this time. I wobbled in and out of anxiety and uncertainty this Christmas season. I am tired of thinking in terms of bleakness and limitation. I am ready for the freshness of unclaimed surprises, with my hand held out.

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From the Archives
January 1, 2005 — Never a Wish Better Than This: Pictures of Wyoming hang in my kitchen. This is the second year I’ve chosen a scenic calendar with images of sparkling mountain streams and jagged snow-capped peaks and horses running through amber waves of grain. There’s still time for me. There’s never a wish better than this.

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