This morning is glowing…The light outside is golden. I would be outside trying to capture a remembrance except the temperature is at 40° and the humidity is 88%. Too cold by far for the shorts and long sleeve “t-shirt” I am wearing. I don’t know if it means anything, but the first day of the new year should be beautiful…
New Years Eve…I have a few chores to finish before the year is over, but I like what Verlyn Klinkenborg has to say ’bout the day (night)…
New Year’s Eve – New York Times
There is something deeply gratifying about joining the horses in their pasture a few minutes before the clock strikes 12 on New Year’s Eve. What makes the night exceptional, in their eyes and mine, is my presence among them, not the lapsing of an old year.It’s worth standing out in the snow just to savor the anticlimax of midnight, just to acknowledge that out of the tens of millions of species on this planet, only one bothers to celebrate not the passing of time, but the way it has chosen to mark the passing of time. I remember the resolutions I made when I was younger. I find myself thinking that one way to describe nature is a realm where resolutions have no meaning.
I like that sentiment. Celebration of the way we mark the passing of time…not the passing of time itself. In effect on New Years we are celebrating the birthday of the Calender!
There seems to be a muse in the air though…Verlyn has this to say at the end of his essay…
New Year’s Eve – New York Times
I always wonder what it would be like to belong to a species — just for a while — that isn’t so busy indexing its life, that lives wholly within the single long strand of its being. I will never have even an idea of what that’s like.
And wandering earlier I came across this from Pete McGregor…
A korimako flies across the paddock to the flowering harakeke , a slow, relaxed flight in the bright sun; flight from a moment ago towards a moment about to happen, each wingbeat beginning the rest of its life. The bird that left the grevillea a hundred metres ago now belongs eternally in the past; the I — whatever “I” might be — that saw the bird launch into flight that moment ago also belongs eternally in the past. I (the same or not?) wonder why we believe we can change the future but not the past? Is it because we remember the past but believe we cannot know the future? How does knowledge differ from memory? The semantics of those questions, I suspect, are a mire — or perhaps they’re a forest where paths fork often, with the branching more than dichotomous? But,Robber fly getting back to the question, which I accept is ill-formed: can we change the future, or is it just as fixed as the past?No. A bald statement, but I see no alternative. Ignoring multiple other universes, one and only one “future” exists; if I could change it, it would become the the one future which was always going to be the one and only future.
The semantics of now…I suppose I’ve read too much sci-fi because I don’t have a problem visualizing the ever branching stream of may have beens leading off onto the future from Now.
Now I’m getting too deep for the end of a year and the start of a new one. Happy Birthday Calendar, and may we celebrate many more together…
LATER – Talk about a difference a few hours can make…It is mid afternoon and the sunny side of the house is registering 86° while it’s 74° in the kitchen with the doors all open, the porch on the north side is at 72°…Yet the prognosticators are calling for a low tonight of 37°. And to think this is what we call winter…
