Wed Dec. 28 Days of Possibility (Susan McKeown)

At the turn of the year when all hope seems to fade
deep within the bleak chill icy cold
comes a voice in our ear for to be unafraid
and have faith all that's lost shall be found...

...no more dwell in sadness but do trust in our hearts
that the New Year will right everything
We do say with one voice we do pray with one heart
for the promise that Christmas doth bring.
-Song of Forgetting

I am not one to laud people’s ability to affect their own destiny, or suggest Oprah-style that one can order up a new life with the universe  (Not that I don’t believe in self empowerment, I just frequently find a troubling lack of social analysis in these claims).  But I do believe that our days are full of possibility.  

I think of how many different people came into my life this last year: a couple new friends, a whole staff of coworkers that seemed like they’d be daily fixtures forever (until our store closed), and countless people who I encountered only once.  And that was only my public life; how many schemes did I work on and abandon, plans did I form and put in motion? Dreams, failures, redirection, losses of family members, of a job, of a clear path toward my goal. The unpredicatbility of life is what makes it rich with possibility.

This time of year reminds us that things change, the year cycles and, though for some of us it might travel similar paths, each step is ripe with the potential of our own choices and the power of our connected nature.

The Song of Forgetting weaves together images of ending and beginning with a sense of hope and possibility.  In the white hollow silence as a new day is born and all the fair world lies asleep tied up with a prayer for the promise that Christmas doth bring. This is perhaps the promise the angel gave to Mary “nothing will be impossible with God;” or the promise of Mary’s son, that God is with us; or the promise that God, whose Love came to transform the world, is also interested in loving us to newness.

This Christmas gift, this sense of hope and possibility, that comes more easily to us at the New Year, is something that calls to us the whole year through, echoing in the birth of each new day. It beckons us again, when the first spring shoot polks out of the snow, when babies are born, when we begin a task again for the eighth time, and on each day in between.


May we hear the call of possibility and the song of hope in each day of the coming year.

-Lindsey