A New Year Wails
The New Year wails, hungry for life, yet death hugs the notes of legends with darkness. Future memories of my youth are taken into its dark embrace. The unfortunate list appears to grow daily: Natalie Cole, David Bowie, The Eagles’ Glenn Frye, Celine Dion’s husband and brother, Tower of Power’s Mic Gillette and even Grizzly Adams, Dan Haggerty, are all nesting in the blue branches of the world floating in time and space as they prepare to return to the mothership.
The stock market plummets, fear of a global slowdown blasts across glossy magazine covers and pundits screech like crows on cable networks as they attempt to simplify what can’t be understood.
In the eastern sky, a full moon rises in lunar largeness, five planets align, visible to the naked eye. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter appear together in the pre-dawn sky for the first time in a decade ushering in powerful forces. To what end, I am unclear. My imagination, sweet and tangible, rough and shapeless, attempts to search for metaphor and meaning.
All I know is that this moment I live in—here and now, in the comfort of a warm January day -- is its beauty. I feel spirit filling me with an uncommon faith to the edges of my ten fingers and toes. It courses through my body with each beat of my heart.
The New Year wails hungry for peace like a newborn in need of nourishment. Mother spirit is right here, comforting us through a colicky dark night.
And so, I write. My New Year’s declaration is to feel young, have fun and be in love with my life. The oneness of possibilities lay before me like an infinite keyboard. White keys, black keys, high notes and low ones, each with a unique sound and vibration waiting to be played.
The song is the music of my life I write. The melody is composed by the notes I play.
While the world wails, I choose to play a lullaby or a song rich with fun notes that travel through time with me, something like Mungo Jerry’s “In the Summertime,” The Eagles “Take it Easy,” or Alan Jackson and Jimmy Buffet’s “It’s 5 O’clock Somewhere.”
I know a soul’s hunger for peace. I understand the chill of fear and the darkness of sorry. Rain falls in each of our hearts. We are all touched by the sad notes, melancholy songs and outrageous raps and rhapsodies as they wash over our wounds cleansing our sliced-open souls.
The infinite keyboard overwhelms; yet, all we need to do is play a single note, then another, then another.
Young. Fun. And, in love.
