Of Winter & Wishes

Many years ago, I had read that how you spend the first day of the year sets the tone for your new year. If you pepper the new year’s day with activities and people you love, they will be a recurring theme and if you have a not-so-great day, it would foretell the theme of your year’s thorns. For a couple of years I tried to intentionally curate the 1st of January as a melange of themes I wanted in the new year, but slowly it became clear that the year tends to have a mind of its own and that no matter how much you might intend a thing, life has other plans.

When I was reading the year-end eulogies of friends and acquaintances, as we are wont to write online, many of them have said that 2024 was a difficult year for them. It was similar for me, too. It could be a matter of age or circumstance that there’s little embellishment and pop to the new year in my social circle. This morning, as I sat in the dining room of a hotel, drinking my two cups of black coffee, I opened the poetry zine mailed to me by my friend OY. The zine is a collection of poems with prompts to write poems inspired by the themes given. The first one is to write a poem about one’s wishes for the new year. What do you wish for, she asks. I couldn’t come up with a suitable list of wishes, so I scribbled some lines in neat cerulean blue ink, eating my airport croissant, drinking a second cup of black coffee.

However, now that I look at the poem, I wish I had done better, written wishes that could become horses, hoping it become a talisman of sorts. Yesterday, my sister asked me, what were the 12 wishes I had made when we ate 12 grapes on NYE in Seattle two years ago. I wasn’t able to tell. I couldn’t recall what I had wished. If you listen to a lot of “successful” people online they will tell you to chart goals, assign deadlines, and follow your desires. I say hogwash to that. I briefly saw someone say that winters are for rest and hibernation, and Januaries must mimic that. We, as a planet, start off on new ideas and washed hope for a change of turn, when we should ideally be hibernating, like the planet does. So, I suppose my biggest wish for the coming year, if it had to be a poem would be this – to fold into the seasons and live like nature intended.

to grow the creepers so long that they tumble out of the window and reach down to the under world where Persephone is running the show / to carve into a block of stone a scene of the salty sea, fish shimmying, treasure on the sea-bed shining / to be inspired by the pain and turn it into art / to not turn the pain into an idol and to not worship it / to turn down the volume of the head and turn up the shy thudding of the heart / to lay in thrall of one’s own fear and courage / to be in awe not in fear / to gaze into the eyes of the past and pick the pearls / to be a mermaid and to not barter my songs to the sea-witch / to lose sight but never to lose heart

Happy new year. Wishing you peace and joy.