Through the Cracks #5: My New Year's Wish for You (and, for Myself)
I send this newsletter edition, wishing each and every one of you a new year full of peace and health, and all the things you wish for in this world. And, I want to say thank you for signing up to receive Through the Cracks in these early days. As promised, those of you who have signed up in 2022 will continue to receive all the benefits through 2023 with no subscription fee. Invite your friends to sign up by sharing the newsletter, because I’m going to extend that offer to new subscribers during the month of January 2023. The more the merrier!
Watch your email for announcements in 2023 about some special offerings for subscribers that are coming up. More on that soon.
For now, as the days draw this year to a close, may wonder and hope fill the days of 2023 for all of us. And that brings me to today’s topic.
Seeing Hope, Literally
Sometimes it takes an image to guide me to the right words. That was true this morning, in a way that it has not been true for a while. This view from my morning walk was worth at least a 1000 words, maybe more.
This little patch of morning fog was all alone, on this one block on the edge of the park. If I had turned around where I stood and taken a picture facing the other direction, you would have seen clear streets, gray, empty, but no fog. And, if you know me at all, you will not be surprised when I say that this sight became the perfect visual representation of my wishes for the new year ahead.
I’ve been spending some time this season of celebration and introspection, trying to consciously understand the many ways in which the past three years have altered my experience of myself and my Self. It is clear to me that one of the things that I have lost is a sense of what I would call “ritualized time,” for example, the sense that there is a special meaning attached to the turning of the calendar from 2022 to 2023. This year, I think there will be none of my usual New Year’s Eve rituals: no letters to God, no burning bowl ritual, no 12 grapes or open doors and windows at midnight. And certainly there will be no midnight walk around the perimeter of the house, since I live in a townhouse. All of these rituals, each in their day, became for me outward manifestations of the kind of hope I tried to manifest for the days ahead on this, the last calendar day of the year. I say tried, because so many times that hope, like any resolutions that I dared to make, did not last past the middle of January. Take, as an example, this picture from the night when the calendar clicked from the end of 2019 to the beginning of 2020.
I know. We know how that year turned out. But don’t mistake my words for cynicism or despair, because in so many ways, I sit here on this morning of December 31st feeling better and calmer than I have in quite some time. And despite everything, I will miss all those New Year’s eve things in a way. Ritualized time and its annual activities grounded me for many years and continue to ground me in so many ways, even when I don’t follow them “to the letter.”
This year, though, my longings and wishes for the new year are anchored in the fog that I saw this morning. Through a book by author Cynthia Bourgeault, I have discovered this phrase…mystical hope…and I can’t look away. These words, and my feelings about them, have everything to do with the fog that fascinates me on my walks in the neighborhood and in so many other places.
Mystical Hope??
Mystical hope is not this: I hope for this good thing or event, but if I don’t get it or it doesn’t happen, all is lost. Mystical hope means that I have hope no matter what comes, I live in hope despite all things, it is a hope that is not tied to outcome. Mystical hope exists outside of time, it has no sell-by date when lack of fulfillment turns hope to despair. Mystical hope is about my experience of being met by something more than that which I can see or control. I sit with this presence, and it changes me at all levels. With this sense of mystical hope, I carry a sense of joy, of strength and satisfaction no matter what happens. I live in what author Milan Kundera termed “an unbearable lightness of being.” To me, mystical hope is the best phrase that I have found to describe what I mean when I talk about the subversive power of light that seeps through the cracks of our brokenness. And now I understand my photographic obsession with fog.
Okay, but the Fog?
It was a metaphor about fog, again, offered by Bourgeault, that led me to my deepest understanding to date of this idea of mystical hope, a metaphor about fog and sailing.
I am, by no means, a proficient sailor. I have, however, had a few outings in a sailboat with a patient captain at the helm, who gave me little jobs along the way to quell my nerves about the water. I have just enough sailing experience to relate to Bourgeault’s words:
On a bright, sunny day you can set your course on a landfall five miles away from you and sail right to it. But in the fog, you make your way by paying close attention to all the things immediately around you: the deep roll of the sea swells as you enter open ocean, the pungent scent of spruce boughs, or the livelier tempo of the waves as you approach the land. You find your way by being sensitively and sensuously connected to exactly where you are, by letting “here” reach out and lead you. You know you belong to a place when you can find your way home by feel. (Bourgeault, Mystical Hope, 49)
There is a kind of knowing, a kind of being, that is possible in the fog that is just not possible when we are deluded into the idea that we are in control of our surroundings and our destination. Mystical hope calls us to steer with a spiritual and a sensual awareness of who we are and where we stand instead of by an intellectual idea of where we are going.
And so I wish this, for you, and for myself, that in 2023 we will not be afraid of the fog, because it comes often. Instead of giving in to the fear of not knowing, we will stand still, and listen, and take a deep breath, searching for the smell of land and sea which will guide us home if we but pay attention. Happy New Year.
More to hear, read, and see
This Little Light of Mine (New Release)