New Year Thoughts

Year’s End 2009


2009 has been a year of heart-rending lows and highs – an invitation to leave behind all-consuming grief and build a new life, a passage through desperate terror and rediscovered adventure, and the gradual recalibration of an emotional, spiritual, and physical seismograph struck by a major life event. It has brought spiritual awakening, poetic activation, and a redefined self-perception. I’ve always thought of years as quantities of time. This year, however, rather resembled a near-death experience, a discovery of the tunnel of light leading to a different dimension. Tonight’s poems reflect year-end thoughts from different years, as the stroke of midnight approaches and we suddenly find ourselves transported across an invisible border to a new round of life.

Rosemary:


New Year’s Eve December 31 2008

I’m watching “Live from Lincoln Center”:

Interview with Loren Maazel – his last concert;

Maestro Maazel says, of his retirement:

“Life is all about Beginnings and Endings.”



This New Year’s eve marks the last hours

Of the last year we spent together on the earth.

And it signals a beginning –

The first moments

Of what I will become this next time “when I grow up”--

My graduation from your school of love,

My soul’s invitation to unfurl and soar.



Finding Joy December 31 2009

Stepping into mystic space, where all is shared,

I look upon this last year and the next

From up above, outside of time.

I see the light of bliss:

It emanates from spirit, not from body.

It glows when we unfold into the moment’s gifts –

A smile, a giggle, a contented sigh,

A loved one’s soul that beams through eyes

And lights up all around us.

I see how Joy suffuses every moment –

Always there – like sun behind the clouds;

Waiting till we shed the dust and clutter

Of our earth-bound selves.



Ellen: Alive at Christmas, After Cancer 1995

Light-sounds drench the world.

Cold winter’s warmth creeps through us.

Shimmering joy explodes.