|
I'VE BEEN FOLLOWING THE MOON . . .
for the last several days, and she's been elusive. Once or twice a day, I check the hour of moonrise and moonset, and wonder if I'll be able to catch a glimpse on my daily walk. When I raise the shades in the morning and when I close them in the evening, I look to see if she's in my line of view. But often it's been too overcast, or the landscape has kept her hidden, my horizon line too high to catch her last hour in the day.
The slow, steady progress and presence of the moon, even when I can't see her for myself, reminds me of the transition between seasons, and the much-needed lesson of liminality that it offers. In other words, that there is no strict 'end' to one point and 'start' to the next. In this sense, the Omen Days have been a transformative practice for viewing the typically harried, emotional, feverish, sometimes punishing deadlines between Christmas Eve and New Year's Day. They have been a ritual that allows me to take my time wandering between one calendar year and the next, noticing all the ways that putting one's finger directly on any given moment eludes us, and how the possibility of surrender - to time, to place, to heart and soul - is the work I want to turn my energy and attention toward.
Are you feeling rushed toward, or away from, a sense of beginning to this 2026 year? Are you wondering why some beginnings always feel fresh, and others like you're hurtling toward the cliff's edge in a car with no brakes? I've been wondering if it's possible to notice the softness of the borders between things, even the ones that seem terribly abrupt or definitive.
The moon offers a lesson in this, as does another topic I found myself thinking of on my morning walk: music. Lately, I've been turning over some small but painful memories of my adolescence, when I first got the message that there were 'right' and 'wrong' musicians to profess my love for. There seems to be a rite of passage, in this modern world, of getting schooled by someone older or cooler than you, on what 'good' music really is, or at least what you 'should' claim to like listening to.
In my husband's family of origin, they had a saying around the table: "Don't yuck my yum." We say it in our house now, a gentle reminder to someone who doesn't like what's on their plate that someone else might feel the opposite, and that offering negative judgments - especially loud or definitive ones - is not necessarily the best way to share a meal with others.
Food and music are similarly subjective art forms - what someone loves, another hates...what isn't allowed in the house for some, is consistently accessible to others. For me, the combination of subjectivity and authority - the latter in the form of a definitive pronouncement of what is 'good' or 'bad' - is a red flag that edges out someone else's experience. In the worst cases, it shuts down curiosity, conversation, and the ability to connect.
This has me thinking about why we as humans try to put clear, defining borders on things in the first place. How, like the border between life and death, we resist the uncertainty of pondering multiple truths. Beginnings can be like that, too - they can cause a lot of stress, they can prompt us to pile up our expectations and hopes, they can trick us into thinking that we can capture them, define them, pronounce them worthy or unworthy.
In The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron writes: "The stringent requirement of a sustained creative life is the humility to start again, to begin anew." This sentence has been a continued lesson for me, on the blank page, and in life. It reminds me to approach beginnings with a sense of surrender that has less to do with giving up and more to do with openness. Over the years of living with this sentence, I've come to understand that beginning anew doesn't mean leaving everything else behind. In the soft, liminal border between one time and the next, there is room for what John O'Donohue calls "the unnoticed miracle of memory," which is that memory is "the intimate mirror of the continuity of your experience and presence."
In the face of such endless wonder, how can we take seriously the urge to yuck someone else's yum? This small shift in perception might open up whole worlds of curiosity and connection that we didn't know were missing. Much like the words of a reader that came to us on the other side of the New Year...a story we'll need this year, and would like to take with us into every year that we're given...
Ella writes:
"I keep goodie bags in my car for the homeless as the population is growing day by day in [my city]. Always quick to hand out five bucks or provide a toothbrush, occasionally when I have people in the car and instinctively rolled down my window at a red light to help out another human, I will get remarks of “why do that,” “they are just going to spend it on drugs anyway”, etc. And just as they are quick to judge, I’m quick to respond, they are people too. That’s somebody's dad or sister or best friend. I don’t know them or how they ended up on the street, but I bet everyone of them would change that situation if they could. It isn’t by choice most of the time, it has more to do with circumstances, and hell if I was to end up on the street in the dead of winter I’d probably do drugs to keep me warm and sane (at least my version of it) all the same. We are so quick to judge others in situations we have yet to experience anything close to. We often take for granted the basic necessities we have daily. So now I’m come to realize I may never play a big role in world wide change, but I have total control over little and constant choices I can choose to make in the community around me...I have excepted the fact I’ll never make enough money to buy everyone without a home and place to live, or every person with cancer a cure. But I can show up in life each day and give love and acceptance."
With the humility to begin again,
Dor + Tay
|
