The Art of Starting a Year

Hello there. I’m wrapping up my imperfect sabbatical and still collecting some thoughts to share shortly. Before I fully re-emerge (I couldn’t help but check in once in a while here with you all because it felt like something more than work), I have a final retreat to make; but I’ll be back next week. In the meantime, I’ve got a poem to share.

This one is especially moody (blame it on the dreary weather). But I feel compelled to try to explain it (which is against the religion of any poet). Suffice to say there’s a lot of personal stuff here, Easter eggs about family and preceding generations and how every story is really an intersection of several narratives all woven together and wrapping around each other, never starting or ending—just dancing.

If you’ll believe it, this one began as a simple idea that the start of any year is an arbitrary demarcation, not a true thing in any sense of the word—and yet, still perhaps something useful.

We say “Happy New Year” and the like when really it’s just another day. But there is something powerful and vulnerable in the act of starting over, in beginning again and admitting when you need a reset. I certainly could use one myself right now, which is why I’m headed for a solo trip to the woods tomorrow.

Oh, and if you’re wanting to join us for the Bestseller Bootcamp in a couple of weeks (Jan. 24 10am-2pm CT), there’s still space. The price goes up on Monday, so don’t miss out. You can get all the details here and sign up here. Would love to see you there. Spots are limited (last I checked, we had about eight left). Once they’re gone, they’re gone, and I don’t plan on doing another one of these anytime soon.

And without further ado, below is the new poem. See what little nuggets you can find hidden in it. Would love to hear your thoughts.

To Start a Year

How do you start a year?
Perhaps the way you begin
Anything:
With an ending—
The cruel, coldness of winter blowing away
Any hint of summer,
The utter erasure of what once was.

Truth is,
We never begin anything.
There is only, ever
the Continuation:
The great wheel of fortune
Pushing us up and down with its vicissitudes,
Leaving a person to wonder:
“Where did my last luck run out?”
And, “what did I ever do
To deserve This?”

Sometimes, you can’t tell if your abandonment comes from God
Or just family.
All you know is the absence
Of a small voice which used to whisper,
“It’s going to be okay.”
It takes a listen, but all I hear is muttering
Hidden in the back of a shaded conscience
Replaced by harsher realities
and the slow crescendo of aloneness.

Where did those friends from childhood go?
Are they all dead now
Or just hiding in the anonymity of a usual life?
Perhaps this is how flowers feel
With the sun now hidden
And the birds gone away,
The bees disappeared
And the trees who once danced
Having wept their final grief.

Maybe this is all growing up is
—a certain graying of everything—
The only truth beyond Eden.
But as I sit by this fire which keeps blowing out,
I’m sure I don’t know.

Where does my story begin?
With jean-jacketed teenagers hiding from responsibility,
Finding each other in the dark—
a girl running her hands through a boy’s soft hair,
Considering what she might give up for him?
Does my descent start with grandfathers whose legacies now outlive them?
A young father in a bar
On the ground
About to bleed his last?
An artist past his prime sliding down a piano bench for a woman he’d just met—
Both wondering
Years later
If they wasted everything
For something so simple
As a family?

Where will my tale conclude?
With wife
And children
Who grieve me?
A friend to remember what we once were
Running down European streets at midnight;
a vacant house in the suburbs;
a journal of incomplete thoughts?
I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know
Where the red fern grows
Or if anyone can ever know anything
At this age.

I want to hope
But even that hurts
Harder than this cold.
Still,
The flowers have the ground to hold them,
And I have you
To hug tight
Early and late:
Tender and here,
Always ready for new beginnings.