With New Year’s Day on a Monday, Saturday and Sunday have been like a long New Year’s Eve. The last-hours-feel in the air crept like fog on Saturday morning just as if it were New Year’s Eve, or even New Year’s itself. But it wasn’t; it was New Year’s Eve Eve. The extended Eve-time gave more time than expected. Time was slowed, stretched. It was a two-day Eve.
Today, well into 2007, a blanket of grey clouds maintains a steady light so there are no shadows to mark the passing day. Time has been delayed.
We are very slow entering this new year. There seems to be no rush to embrace ‘07, but our hesitation is not because of a particular fondness for ’06. Dwindling optimism fuels the trepidation for a new year. There is a resignation to powerlessness that makes effecting change seem impossible and the gap between how things are and how things should be widens. The assumption is that ’07 will be a lot like ’06...status quo.
Yet, one-on-one, eye-to-eye, the perfect world is possible, is inhabitable, is real and solid, when it is one-on-one, eye-to-eye. Optimism is rejuvenated when influence cast on the closest sphere, the near arms-length sphere, ripples back with a thorough embrace that goes on and on.
The world-at-large is too large to feel any sway attempt exerted by one. The world that is one’s garden is small enough to feel every pressure, delicately applied, to respond to every attention paid, so the garden is a reflection of the garden in the mind of the gardener. The gardener’s shadow falls large.
For this new year...let us cultivate our garden.