Here we are in the first month of the New Year. Hope abides as I release some things of the past year and hold onto others.
As I looked into the open door of my study with stacks of ongoing writing projects strewn on the floor, the sun was streaming through the windows onto my bookshelves and to the old rocking chair my mother refinished when she was but a new bride to my father. An affection for books, writing, and my mother’s refinished labor of love washed over me as I took in the scene.
On her deathbed at 93 years old, it was this same chair she repeatedly instructed me to take upon her passing.
So today, when the study door was slightly ajar and the sun shone a golden beam on the wooden back of that rocker, I cried for the very first time since my Mom’s passing nearing two years ago this spring.
The tears finally arrived, not in sobs, but in silent streams.
This sweetness I shall hold onto.
Another heartfelt departure I shall hold onto is the old Benedictine Monastery which just closed its doors after the recent sale of the land, chapel, hermitages, and monastic dwelling spaces in the Capitol Creek Valley of Old Snowmass.
The few remaining elderly monks and brothers who have spent their holy lives in prayer, in tending to the land, and in the hearts of retreatants world-wide have now relinquished the property in a final farewell. The locals and those of us who remain spiritually and indelibly touched by their gentle wisdom are feeling heartsick.
Of this sweetness I shall hold onto.
But I will not hold onto all things from the past year. I will let go of the strife and the clamoring rhetoric that echoes throughout the lands and seas, the divisive hatred welling up in what we ironically call humanity.
I will cling to hope. And I will voice my “yes” as “yes” and my “no” as “no.”
There’s a passage in Lord of the Rings where the faithful hobbit Sam expresses his joy in the Eden-like land of Lórien:
I feel as if I was inside a song, if you take my meaning.
The hopeful theme of singing a new song rings out in several places of the Old Testament Psalms:
O sing to the Lord a new song
—Psalm 33:3; 40:3; 98:1; 144:9
Music speaks some well-tuned advice in “The Charge” by poet Denise Levertov:
Returning/
To all the unsaid/
All the lost living untranslated/
In any sense,/
And the dead/
Unrecognized, celebrated/
Only in dreams that die by morning/
Is a mourning or ghostwalking only./
You must make, said music/
In its voices of metal and wood/
In its dancing diagrams, moving/
Apart and together, along/
And over and under a line/
And speaking in one voice,/
Make/
My image. Let be/
What is gone.
Even nature sings out from Tolkien’s trees in The Lord of the Rings, and from the lion Aslan as he sings creation into being in C.S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew from The Chronicles of Narnia.
And anyone who has ever hiked the deep mountains, or listened to wind through aspen leaves in the forest might appreciate the song and clapping imagery found in the book of Isaiah:
Yes, in joy you shall depart,
in peace you shall be brought back;
Mountains and hills shall break out
in song before you,
and all the trees of the countryside
shall clap their hands.
—Isaiah 55:12
And may I add, that even NASA scientists acknowledge the songs of stars by listening to stellar sound waves with telescopes:
We can’t hear it with our ears, but the stars in the sky are performing a concert, one that never stops. The biggest stars make the lowest, deepest sounds, like tubas and double basses. Small stars have high-pitched voices, like celestial flutes. These virtuosos don’t just play one ‘note’ at a time, either—our own Sun has thousands of different sound waves bouncing around inside it at any given moment.
—Elizabeth Landau, NASA Exoplanet Exploration Program
Tree—Lion—Star? If these are singing, even in the folds of just a story, so shall I! A new song then for a New Year. A song of joy. A song of life. No matter the negatives which will surely come…I will sing a new song of hope.
‘Let go, let fly, forget.
You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note.’
—Part Two: Station Island XII line 29-30, by Seamus Heaney
Wishing a year of authentic voices, discerning ears, and finely-tuned hearts.
Thanks for stopping by. ♥
https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/news/1516/symphony-of-stars-the-science-of-stellar-sound-waves/
Edited by Lavan, O’Donoghue, Hollis. The Poems of Seamus Heaney. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025.
Levertov, Denise. The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov. New Directions, 2013.
Lewis, C.S. The Magician’s Nephew. First Collier Books Edition, 1955.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. HarperCollinsPublishers, 2004.