There ought to be a mandate for fireworks as the year changes. Not so much because it is special, more so as to shake us.
The New Year falls close to the solstice. It does, as it should, create a stirring in our hibernation. Tucked deep in thought rather than clipping fields, I find myself pondering the year behind me, the choices I made, the reasons behind them. It is in the looking back that I am able to begin the idea of moving forward.
In his poem, “The Blue House”, Tomas Transfstomer talks about each of our lives having a “sister ship”, a path that follows “quite another route” than the path that we are on. Like Transfstomer standing among the trees and seeing his house from a completely different perspective, once in a while we are given a glimpse of our sister ship, the possibilities of what might have been as it silently sails parallel to our current course. Who might we have been had we loved another, chosen not to bear children, stayed true to our passions? What would our past year have looked like had we had quit that job, taken down that mask, chosen that flight? We cannot and should not know.
We can only make choices and know that each comes with gains and losses. We can stand in the trees and watch our sister ship glide past us, people on the bow gaily waving at us from above, some happier than us, some more sad. Turn and look at our house, as it stands, understanding that it will be repainted when we are gone but grateful and accepting for the way it is right now.
The New Year holds many promises and many questions, one of which might be, who do you really want to be in this very moment.
The Blue House, by Tomas Transtromer
It is night with glaring sunshine. I stand in the woods and look towards my house
with its misty blue walls. As though I were recently dead and saw the house from
a new angle.
It has stood for more than eighty summers. Its timber has been impregnated, four
times with joy and three times with sorrow. When someone who has lived in the
house dies it is repainted. The dead person paints it himself, without a brush,
from the inside.
On the other side is open terrain. Formerly a garden, now wilderness. A still surf
of weed, pagodas of weed, an unfurling body of text, Upanishades of weed, a
Viking fleet of weed, dragon heads, lances, an empire of weed.
Above the overgrown garden flutters the shadow of a boomerang, thrown again
and again. It is related to someone who lived in the house long before my time.
Almost a child. An impulse issues from him, a thought, a thought of will: “create.
. .draw. ..” In order to escape his destiny in time.
The house resembles a child’s drawing. A deputizing childishness which grew
forth because someone prematurely renounced the charge of being a child. Open
the doors, enter! Inside unrest dwells in the ceiling and peace in the walls. Above
the bed there hangs an amateur painting representing a ship with seventeen sails,
rough sea and a wind which the gilded frame cannot subdue.
It is always so early in here, it is before the crossroads, before the irrevocable
choices. I am grateful for this life! And yet I miss the alternatives. All sketches
wish to be real.
A motor far out on the water extends the horizon of the summer night. Both joy
and sorrow swell in the magnifying glass of the dew. We do not actually know it,
but we sense it: our life has a sister vessel which plies an entirely different route.
While the sun burns behind the islands.