May Your Year Be This Colorful
& happy, happy, happy, happy, happy.
I’m popping in to wish you a Happy New Year.
Simple salutations like Happy Solstice or Merry Christmas have meant a lot to me this season. I feel the power of these ordinary benedictions, and I’m reminded of Danusha Laméris’s poem “Small Kindnesses,” which I have copied below. In that poem she says that these brief moments of exchange may be the “true dwelling of the holy.”
Yes, a happy new year to you!
I hope you’re having a wonderful first day of 2025. Mine started with a sweet hike at Jack Hill State Park to see a pitcher plant bog. Rank strangers were showering me with Happy New Year, and I showered them in return—our small kindnesses. Together we made “fleeting temples.”
My day progressed to a Collardfest with our friends the Culbreaths in Tifton, Georgia. I ate my share of black-eyed peas for luck and collards for prosperity, plus some of my partner Raven’s pork and kraut, the German tradition for claiming wealth and blessings in the new year. I should be doubly covered.
My friend Julia sent me this photo of the northern lights that she took this morning near her home in Haines, Alaska. I don’t think she’ll mind me sharing it with you.
Small Kindnesses
By Danusha Laméris
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”
Everyday kindness is a way of living, and it’s contaginous
Know how in the South we say, "I'm good," when someone asks how we're doing? A teacher at Drepung Loesling in Atlanta once said that each time he says this he is reminded that he truly is fundamentally good and capable of goodness, and each time someone answers him in this way he is reminded of their fundamental goodness & capacity for good actions. Don't you love that? So Happy New Year, Janisse--we're doing good up here in MN, and I trust all is good with you and yours back in GA!