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More verses by robert burns than most people know:
(There are more lyrics after the instrumental interlude)
James Agate— New Year’s Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.
François de La Rochefoucauld— There are very few things impossible in themselves; and we do not want means to conquer difficulties so much as application and resolution in the use of means.
Rainer Maria Rilke— And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been.
Mark Twain— Now is the accepted time to make your annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.
Burning the Old Year
By Naomi Shihab Nye
.
Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.
So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.
Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.
Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.
New Year Resolve
by May Sarton
.
The time has come
To stop allowing the clutter
To clutter my mind
Like dirty snow,
Shove it off and find
Clear time, clear water.
.
Time for a change,
Let silence in like a cat
Who has sat at my door
Neither wild nor strange
Hoping for food from my store
And shivering on the mat.
.
Let silence in.
She will rarely mew,
She will sleep on my bed
And all I have ever been
Either false or true
Will live again in my head.
.
For it is now or not
As old age silts the stream,
To shove away the clutter,
To untie every knot,
To take the time to dream,
To come back to still water.
I decided some time ago that the ordinary New Year’s resolutions were a pit full of sharpened stakes just waiting to impale me.
All those exterior self-improvement resolutions are such negative reflections on who I am. In this season of the long dark, they’re just the thing to push me ever deeper into what is now called SAD – the all-too-obvious reality that darkness inwinter is depressing, which has finally been officially labeled and cataloged by medical science.
So I’ve looked for resolutions which would lift my spirits instead of lowering them. One December, I resolved to “drink more wine” in the coming year. Another year, my resolution was to “find more things to laugh about.”
As I mentioned in a prior post, Writing for Peace www.dailykos.com/..., this year I’ve resolved to try writing by hand as a meditation, focusing on peace, both within myself and as a search for new ideas to help it spread in the world. This is a lot more ambitious than my usual resolutions, but 2015 has been such a scary year, especially in U.S. politics and jurisprudence, I feel compelled to give it a try.
Right now, that “journey of a thousand miles” looks like I’ll be headed up a steep and treacherous road in 2016, but I will nevertheless take my first step, pen in hand, on January 1.
This coming year may all my good intentions and yours, whatever you have chosen, set our feet on more positive roads.
SOURCES AND FURTHER READING:
The poem, Burning the Old Year, is from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, © 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye, Far Corner Books
www.poets.org/…
The poem, New Year Resolve, is from The Silence Now:New and Uncollected Earlier Poems,© 1988 by May Sarton, W.W. Norton & Company
writersalmanac.publicradio.org/…
books.google.com/…
The quote with Buddha from sungazing.com, courtesy of Leigh Ann Hurtz and G.w. Werner
Imagine plaque in Strawberry Fields, Central Park, NYC www.centralpark.com/...
