It has been another exhausting year. Covid has continued to circulate, even as climate change has become ever more difficult to ignore, bringing terrible heat here to the Pacific Northwest and fires, tornados, floods, and drought elsewhere.
There have been blessings, of course. A new baby born to one of my two daughters, and the other daughter looking forward to the birth of twins next spring. There have been days spent with friends and family and hours spent in my garden. There have been walks and writing projects and books to read.
There has been love and there has been sorrow.
It is difficult to know how to approach this next year, which will bring the start of year three of our living with the virus, along with everyday blessings in each of our lives. So, because I haven’t the words for my wish that the new year will be kind to us all, and because the Irish mystic John O’Donohue left us so many beautiful words, I give you his Blessing For The New Year from his book, To Bless the Space Between Us:
BEANACHT (A Blessing For the New Year)
On the day when
The weight deadens
On your shoulders
And you stumble,
May the clay dance
To balance you.
And when your eyes
Freeze behind
The gray window
And the ghost of loss
Gets into you,
May a flock of colors,
Indigo, red, green
And azure blue,
Come to awaken in you
A meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays
In the curraagh of thought
And a stain of ocean
Blackens beneath you,
May there come across the waters
A path of yellow moonlight
To bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
May the clarity of light be yours,
May the fluency of the ocean be yours,
May the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
Wind work these words
Or love around you,
An invisible cloak
To mind your life.
As we enter this new year, may your joys outweigh your sorrows and may you have an invisible cloak to mind your life.
