Time and Again

 Back around the turn of the century, when a lot of people were into the idea of the calendar turning such a big page, I read enough about the history of the calendar to realize how arbitrary it is, how we might have organized weeks and years into different blocks and so formed a different world. While the big civic calendar-making job feels pretty much set in stone, there is another kind of personal calendar making, the way we feel the passage of time,  the way we blend the religious and civic events we observe alongside homespun rituals and important life passages to make up our own seasons. The first appearance of the forsythia in a backyard heralds spring much more reliably than what the calendar says, and the birthday of a loved one makes dull wintry February shine with a warm glow.

Some of the important days I observe include Opening Day of the Baseball Season, which involves sneaking off from work to see the first game if at all possible; and the annual ritual of getting the music issue of the Oxford American magazine, which comes with a CD crammed with great music, some old some new, some obscure, some you know by heart. And one of the unfixed holidays very important to me revolves around the harvest of the first great tomato, a celebration of some of the best stuff God ever imagined.

But really, whoever picked January One for the marking of the New Year? Terrible choice, the middle of winter, jammed so close to Christmas. My new year starts in the back to school impulse of early fall. Every year, I want to buy new notebooks and hang my clothes up neatly in anticipation of a new start. It makes sense that sixteen years (now it’s up to almost 20!) as a student starting a new school year will pattern one’s brain in a permanent circuit.

Come Labor Day, I am always thinking about a fresh start, a clean blackboard, and a chance to be a different kind of person. Who will I be this year? The smartest? The class clown?  The moody introvert or the sunny popular kid? Each year we get to choose again, though our choices are constantly being shaped, winnowed by biology, geography, fate.

By the end of September, I have ink on my cuffs and a dozen new writing projects and am reminded that the choices for me always come down to my connection to language, words, writing, creativity. And I return to a beloved poem by Marge Piercy that speaks to my sense of vocation and my sense of time. It is, fittingly a new years poem, written for a celebration of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year that we celebrated last week. In it, Piercy writes:

Like any poet I wrestle the holy name

and know there is no wording finally

can map, constrain or summon that fierce

voice whose long wind lifts my hair

chills my skin and fills my lungs

to bursting. I serve the word

I cannot name, who names me daily,

who speaks me out by whispers and shouts.  

Coming to the new year, I am picked

up like the ancient ram’s horn to sound

over the congregation of people and beetles,

of pines, whales, marshawks and asters.

Then I am dropped into the factory of words

to turn my little wheels and grind my own

edges, back on piece work again, knowing

there is no justice we don’t make daily

like bread and love. . .

Though I am not Jewish, this poem feels like a liturgy I want to pray. It combines the natural world, the social world, the inner and outer art of living. It touches on the way time is both a reality and illusion, a motivation to be mindful of the precious present moment and to the sweeping force that catches us up in its tides.

So happy new year to you, whoever you choose to be this year, whatever subject life will offer you to consider and learn from and teach. Blessings on the way. 

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Poem "Ram's Horn Sounding," by  Marge Piercy from The Art f Blessing the Day: Poems With a Jewish Theme  (Knopf, 1999). 

Photo of the Coosa River.