I figured I’d offer some reassurance at the beginning of 2024: YDP will be as eclectic as ever, as haphazard in what gets picked up and woven in with the rest of what fills my brain, so that you can rely on at least one thing remaining the same in your lives.

For a start it’ll be some thoughts by the Italian Marxist Antonin Gramsci, a poem by Ruth Awad, a Lebanese-American poet who is also a tattoo artist and an insurance manager who collects rescue Pomeranians, and some views of my pear tree. How is that for a mix?

House Finches

Regular readers are familiar with the pear tree, and its neighboring hawthorn tree, seen from my chair where I hang out when my body – what else is new – vetoes the plans for various hikes and outings yet again. It is where I found myself last week, amazed at the variety of birds who kept me company this late in the season, a humming bird included.

Anna’s Hummingbird

It gave me time to reread Gramsci, in particular his apropos musings on (not) celebrating the New Year. I don’t share his sentiment of hating the occasion, although I don’t love New Year’s either. At my age, frankly, one of the thoughts that is inescapable when you are feeling lousy and the numbers change from ’23 to ’24, is personal: will this be the year I die? After all we lost a lot of friends this year – here is an Oregon ArtsWatch list which included a mirror photograph I took of Henk Pander during our Mutual Portraits project, a close friend enormously missed.

But Gramsci sets me right in the rest of his one page-proclamation: you want to focus on continuity and spirit, not on breaking points and final balances, filled with resolutions that you will not keep.

“I want every morning to be a new year’s for me. Every day I want to reckon with myself, and every day I want to renew myself…..I would like every hour of my life to be new, though connected to the ones that have passed.”

Song Sparrow

In one of the stranger deliberations I’ve read in a while, he also hopes for the arrival of socialism in order to jettison the celebration dates handed down by the ancestors. I guess it would give us something to talk about, shared hopes for differing reasons….

Thrushes

Not so sure what I would talk about with today’s poet, Ruth Awad, whose work, as far as I’ve read it, lacks the balance of emotionality and intellect that I so crave. If that sounds condescending it is not meant to be – there is much to be said for the offerings of the Ruth Awads or Maggi Smiths of the world, embraced by contemporary readers for their accessibility and courage to be sentimental. If it keeps an interest in poetry alive, so be it.

I mean it.

Black capped chickadees

The poem below, published in The Atlantic at the end of the year, drew me in, though, for one specific sentiment, expressed in the last words:

“…if only you’ll let he world soften you with its touching.”

To let the world soften us, or even better, to comfort and fill us with occasional awe at a time when we tend to harden from fear and/or sorrow, we have to attend to it. The “world” is all around us, easily, constantly available, no extravagant or even local excursions needed. You just have to sit and look, birds perching in the pear tree, reminding us of an existence not governed by dates, or resolutions, just renewal from hour to hour, here, now, in 2024.

Gramsci’s theory of Hegemony, a strategy of power pursued through cultural work, can wait. So can my knitting. Or folding the laundry. I just look at the birds. It is healing.

White crowned sparrow

Reasons to Live

Because if you can survive
the violet night, you can survive

the next, and the fig tree will ache
with sweetness for you in sunlight that arrives

first at your window, quietly pawing
even when you can’t stand it,

and you’ll heavy the whining floorboards
of the house you filled with animals

as hurt and lost as you, and the bearded irises will form
fully in their roots, their golden manes

swaying with the want of spring—
live, live, live, live!—

one day you’ll put your hands in the earth
and understand an afterlife isn’t promised,

but the spray of scorpion grass keeps growing,
and the dogs will sing their whole bodies

in praise of you, and the redbuds will lay
down their pink crowns, and the rivers

will set their stones and ribbons
at your door if only

you’ll let the world
soften you with its touching.

by Ruth Awad

Chestnut backed Chickadees

Music today is conducted by a guy named Birnbaum – pear tree – the enchanting second movement of Schubert’ Symphony #8, the Great.

Here is the full version with a different orchestra, Mallwitz conducting.

Nuthatch