klsiegel320 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
klsiegel320) wrote2010-01-01 03:54 pm
klsiegel320) wrote2010-01-01 03:54 pm
(no subject)
Wishing everyone a wonderful, bright and blessed New Year!
(Not yet a new decade, sorry - we count from 1 to 10, not from 0 to 9, so we really don't begin a new decade until next year. I will happily wish you all a wonderful new decade - when we get there.)
I know better, at the tender age of 44, than to make wild promises - I will write every day, I will write something for every single Brigit's Flame prompt, I will [fill in impossible commitment of your choice].
I know that I will try to write more this year. I've been writing more since August, although not here; in fact, I think I wrote more between August and December than I'd written in the previous two years. I know that that has been absolutely necessary to my emotional and spiritual well-being, and that when I have not been attentive to that writing, there have been less than desirable consequences.
I know that I will be singing more. Schola is headed for Canterbury, to be choir-in-residence for Evensong, from July 19 to July 22 (if you're in Canterbury then, come hear us - we're pretty terrific, actually). And I have at least one solo commitment already on my calendar, and the suspicion that there will be others come summer.
But really - I don't know much about what lies ahead. None of us do. We look out through the moonlit doorway, and at midnight we step through - we turn the page of the calendar, we start a new page of the diary, we open a fresh new book of days to read. Somehow, in that magical, midnight moment, all possibility is open to us.
We like to see that as positive, and it is; we can indeed turn the page and move forward. We can do that every day, but somehow it feels more momentous as the old year rolls out and the new tolls in.
But really - we do not know what lies ahead on this road. If we're realistic, we know that there is pain as well as joy awaiting in this new year. We hope for more of the latter than the former, but there are no guarantees.
I think of where I stood a year ago, fresh from two exhilarating performances with the NJSO, eagerly anticipating the spring season. I did not know that within four short months I would lose not one but both of my beloved feline companions. Nor did I know that come August, I would step up in front of my congregation and sing a duet with a good friend, nor what would follow from that audacious step.
I think of a little tiny life, a life entirely and completely enclosed by the 2009 calendar and by her mother's body; a life that never breathed the air, never saw the moon, never opened a book. In the grand scheme of the universe, she is barely a footnote, so briefly here and so swiftly gone - and yet she has touched and moved so many of us in the past two weeks. She never drew breath in the world, and yet she has left an indelible mark on us. What power there is, in the smallest life!
I think of the eerie, striking juxtaposition - on St. Stephen's Day, her tiny white coffin with its elegant spray of pink flowers, placed so that behind it one inescapably saw the manger and the infant Christ superimposed. Death and life, grief and joy, ending and beginning - all together, inseparable, indivisible, eternally intertwined. In the midst of life, we are in death - but in the midst of death, we are in life, as well. Joy and sorrow are two faces of one coin.
So I do wish you all joy in the coming year, but more than that - I wish you all the keenness of that joy that comes from knowing how brief, how uncertain, and thus how precious our lives are, every moment of them, however small and insignificant those moments may seem.
Bright blessings!
kls
(Not yet a new decade, sorry - we count from 1 to 10, not from 0 to 9, so we really don't begin a new decade until next year. I will happily wish you all a wonderful new decade - when we get there.)
I know better, at the tender age of 44, than to make wild promises - I will write every day, I will write something for every single Brigit's Flame prompt, I will [fill in impossible commitment of your choice].
I know that I will try to write more this year. I've been writing more since August, although not here; in fact, I think I wrote more between August and December than I'd written in the previous two years. I know that that has been absolutely necessary to my emotional and spiritual well-being, and that when I have not been attentive to that writing, there have been less than desirable consequences.
I know that I will be singing more. Schola is headed for Canterbury, to be choir-in-residence for Evensong, from July 19 to July 22 (if you're in Canterbury then, come hear us - we're pretty terrific, actually). And I have at least one solo commitment already on my calendar, and the suspicion that there will be others come summer.
But really - I don't know much about what lies ahead. None of us do. We look out through the moonlit doorway, and at midnight we step through - we turn the page of the calendar, we start a new page of the diary, we open a fresh new book of days to read. Somehow, in that magical, midnight moment, all possibility is open to us.
We like to see that as positive, and it is; we can indeed turn the page and move forward. We can do that every day, but somehow it feels more momentous as the old year rolls out and the new tolls in.
But really - we do not know what lies ahead on this road. If we're realistic, we know that there is pain as well as joy awaiting in this new year. We hope for more of the latter than the former, but there are no guarantees.
I think of where I stood a year ago, fresh from two exhilarating performances with the NJSO, eagerly anticipating the spring season. I did not know that within four short months I would lose not one but both of my beloved feline companions. Nor did I know that come August, I would step up in front of my congregation and sing a duet with a good friend, nor what would follow from that audacious step.
I think of a little tiny life, a life entirely and completely enclosed by the 2009 calendar and by her mother's body; a life that never breathed the air, never saw the moon, never opened a book. In the grand scheme of the universe, she is barely a footnote, so briefly here and so swiftly gone - and yet she has touched and moved so many of us in the past two weeks. She never drew breath in the world, and yet she has left an indelible mark on us. What power there is, in the smallest life!
I think of the eerie, striking juxtaposition - on St. Stephen's Day, her tiny white coffin with its elegant spray of pink flowers, placed so that behind it one inescapably saw the manger and the infant Christ superimposed. Death and life, grief and joy, ending and beginning - all together, inseparable, indivisible, eternally intertwined. In the midst of life, we are in death - but in the midst of death, we are in life, as well. Joy and sorrow are two faces of one coin.
So I do wish you all joy in the coming year, but more than that - I wish you all the keenness of that joy that comes from knowing how brief, how uncertain, and thus how precious our lives are, every moment of them, however small and insignificant those moments may seem.
Bright blessings!
kls
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Persephone
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And the baby girl...she was the daughter of a friend from the choir and his wife, stillborn at term because the cord got kinked around her foot on the day before she was to have been delivered by planned C-section. I cannot quite describe the roller coaster we've all been on, the past week and more - the loss inextricably intertwined with the joy of Christmas celebrations has (obviously) had a profound impact.
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And writing so moving I actually shared it with my father and stepmother.
:-)