December 31: "We Shake with Joy," Joys and Sorrows, Happy New Year

One last Mary Oliver poem . . . 

We Shake with Joy

by:  Mary Oliver

We shake with joy, we shake with grief.

What a time they have, these two

housed as they are in the same body.

As the year of Mary Oliver draws to a close tonight, I thought it would be appropriate to end with probably one of her most well-known poems.  It holds so much wisdom and perfectly suits this meditation on New Year's Eve, when everyone looks back on the joys and sorrows of the past 365 days and looks to the future.  .

Let's start with grief.  My loyal disciples may recall that I struggled many months at the beginning of 2023 with darkness.  It wasn't until the beginning of summer that a little light started breaking through the cracks.  I think it was due to an accumulation of emotions from the past few years of loss after loss after loss.  For quite a while, I simply went through the motions of my days, my eyes buried in the ground in front of me.  Because looking up required a certain amount of hope on my part, and hope was in such short supply that it was practically nonexistent.  

Eventually, as the days grew longer,  I began to feel something completely foreign and wondrous:  happiness.  Instead of looking down, I raised my head to the heavens and felt sunlight on my face.  Slowly, slowly, the darkness receded, and I began to find small moments of grace each and every day.  Sure, I still experienced sadness,  It's impossible to be a human being on this broken planet without feeling isolated and angry and alone and sad every once in a while.  Yet, I was able to find laughter and enjoyment again--with friends and family and the simple blessings of every day.  Sunrises.  Poetry.  Chocolate.  Music.  Teaching.

Which brings me to joy:  I have so much for which to be thankful in this past year.  Healthy and happy family.  Work that I enjoy a great deal with people I enjoy a great deal.  Being named 2023 Writer of the Year at the City of Marquette Art Awards.  A new, reliable car.  My daughter graduating from college and moving on with the next phase of her life--medical school on the horizon.  A son who is finding his way in the world.  And friends, friends, friends who've lifted me up, given me so much love and support.

Mary Oliver is right.  Joy and grief can and must coexist.  You can't have one without the other.  They define each other, the way shadow defines light.  If you love deeply, you will mourn deeply.  If you dance, eventually, you will weep.  No getting around it.  Oliver embraces the entire messy universe, celebrates each firefly and teardrop.  

If you are in a dark place right now, know that light is coming.  If you are clothed in light right now, throw your arms out and blossom into something beautiful.

Saint Marty wishes you all a Happy New Year!

December 31: Great Canyon of Clouds, Happy New Year, Namaste

Santiago eats as night comes on . . . 

Under the stars and with the night colder all the time he ate half of one of the dolphin fillets and one of the flying fish, gutted and with its head cut off.

"What an excellent fish dolphin is to eat cooked," he said. "And what a miserable fish raw. I will never go in a boat again without salt or limes."

If I had brains I would have splashed water on the bow all day and drying, it would have made salt, he thought. But then I did not hook the dolphin until almost sunset. Still it was a lack of preparation. But I have chewed it all well and I am not nauseated.

The sky was clouding over to the east and one after another the stars he knew were gone. It looked now as though he were moving into a great canyon of clouds and the wind had dropped.

This passage seems like an appropriate one to end the year of The Old Man and the Sea.  The fish is still alive and pulling the boat.  Santiago is eating, preparing for the coming battle.  And there are no sharks anywhere in sight.

It is New Year's Eve.  In a few short hours, I will countdown to midnight, blow some cheap party horns, and shout "Happy New Year!"  

We shout that phrase at the top of our lungs at midnight every December 31st/January 1st.  Maybe it's a prayer, ancient and hopeful--summoning goodness and luck and grace for the coming 365 days.  Sometimes it's an exclamation of relief.  Thank God the old year is over!  Good riddance.  Shalom.  Aloha.  Godspeed.

When you think about it, so many ways of saying "goodbye" are also ways of saying "hello."  Aloha--goodbye, hello.  See ya--see ya later, see ya soon.  Ciao--Italian, same thing.  Salut!--French.  Namaste--Hindi.  

That's what we're really doing on New Year's Eve--bidding farewell and welcome in the same breath.

I, for one, am happy that 2022 is going to be in my rearview mirror.  It hasn't been an easy twelve months.  In fact, they have been filled with sadness and loss, grief, a search for meaning.  Just because we are now going to be writing "2023" instead of "2022," it doesn't mean the doors of heaven have been blown wide open and the saints are going to come marching in.  The same monkeys that were on my back in the old year are riding on my shoulders in the new one.

Yet, I have hope.  In the midst of all of my struggles last year, there were blessings and grace.  My son is doing great in school.  My daughter made the Dean's List again this semester.  All of my close family and friends are healthy and happy.  I got two classes to teach next semester at the university.  So, although I've been fumbling around in the dark since last February, there is light.  Like the moon pushing through storm clouds on the winter solstice.

I'm blowing in the New Year at my parents' house with my sisters.  We will eat a lot of junk food, play board games, and pop some balloons.  It's the first time we have been able to celebrate together since 2019.  COVID sidelined the party in 2020 and 2021.  Our ranks have certainly shrunk.  In 2019, my mother and sister, Rose, were still with us.  Yet, despite the empty places at the dining room table, I think we will all feel joy at just being together.  Alive.  In the moment.

So, ciao, Santiago.  Aloha, great fish.  Namaste, Ernest Hemingway.  

Saint Marty wishes you all a Happy New Year!  See ya in 2023.

December 31: Sandra McPherson, "A Pumpkin at New Year's," Happy New Year

A Pumpkin at New Year's

by:  Sandra McPherson

Heads were rolling down the highway in high slat trucks.   

I knew it was time to buy you and found you,

The last sphere unscarred and undistorted in the store,   

Big as my own head.

It was time too to leave you uncut and full-featured,   

Like the grandpa of twenty-five pumpkins in my past,   

Khrushchev-cheeked and dwelling on yourself,   

Great knee of my childhood.

I plainly thought you would rot.

I remembered the fetor of other pumpkins,

Their blue populations coming out of hiding as if at the end   

Of some apocalypse.

I devoted a day to reading up on minor cucurbits:   

I learned your dozen names in African

And came home ready to raise or raze you,   

Positive of change.

But so far—eternity. I think I would not like   

Eternity, after I had used my senses up,

As I’ve tried with you—fingertips dragging over your world   

Pole to pole

Till they go dead like explorers, nostril cilia

Detecting your fragrance more delicate than they—

And my patience. It’s Christmas, it’s a new year   

And I hear

Of a family who’s kept you for four ...

You endure like matter manufactured

And indeed your stem seems punched into your orange gathers

Like a button in a mattress.

Shall I give you a room or a shrine? And shall I   

Purchase you a mate and family,

When ours is so inadequate, fixed upon your window   

Deathbed as we are,

Centered upon a time and birth, new holiday, new friends,   

New pumpkins, celebrating when all

That has failed us has passed away.

You have not failed.

__________________________________

A poem for New Year's.

I need to go play a game with my son now.  He's forcing me to play Pugopoly, which is Monopoly with pugs.  I have always hated that game.  These are the sacrifices we make.

Saint Marty needs some champagne.  Or Cheetos.

January 1: "Charlotte's Web," Year of the Runt, Happy New Year

Small and weak

"Well," said her mother, "one of the pigs is a runt.  It's very small and weak, and it will never amount to anything.  So your father has decided to do away with it."

Wilbur the pig does not have a very auspicious start in Charlotte's Web.  As E. B. White writes, Wilbur is a runt, small and weak.  None of the adults on the farm expect him to survive.  As Fern's mother says, "...it will never amount to anything."  Wilbur is a victim of low expectations.

Welcome to the Year of the Runt.  In 2014, I will be focusing on E. B. White's little book about the friendship between a pig and a spider.  It ranked number ten on Entertainment Weekly's greatest novels of all time.  That's pretty good for a story about a runt.

I sort of felt like Wilbur for most of the year 2013.  People didn't seem to expect a whole hell of a lot out of me.  I always thought I was a really valuable employee.  Hard-working, dedicated, loyal.  I thought I was a pretty good church organist.  Dependable, a little talented, adaptable.  I thought I was a gifted poet/writer.

Well, my hours were cut at work.  The church gave my organist job to somebody else.  And I lost no less than three poetry competitions I entered.  I am the runt of the litter.  I need to find a spider to spin a few webs for me.  Maybe something like "Some Poet" or "Wonderful Musician" or "Will Play Organ for Food."

I'm not going to write about any worries tonight.  That's not a great way to start out a new year.  I will cling to the idea of hope and happiness.  The year 2013 is in my rear view mirror, and I give thanks for that fact.  Wilbur started his life as a worry.  A mouth that couldn't be fed.  Through love, Wilbur manages to live and thrive.  He becomes something extraordinary.

This year, through love, I will accomplish extraordinary things.  I have to believe that.

Saint Marty wishes all his disciples a blessed and happy new year.