This Month’s
January 2025
hello
Hey everyone. I love when we all celebrate the passing of time together. By which I mean: Happy New Year.
A season of shrinking my world, or so I claimed a few months ago. Though now, I can’t stop watching outer space movies. I’m roughly a decade late but I watched both Gravity and Interstellar. They are different and not to be compared other than to say two major space epics were released within a year of one another. To be inspired by the stars is ancient and sacred. And our habits of creation are often already alive in the ether. Accidentally tethered to our peers.
I claim to shrink my world, then reconsider my Mars plans; old habits die hard. Though, the end of the world certainly won’t look the way we imagine it might. Recently, a friend told me he’s uninterested in apocalypse poems. “Full disclosure,” he wrote to me: “I have a distaste for end-of-the-world poems and extinction thinking generally… The ecological and geopolitical questions of survival and thriving can be agitated but not formulated or addressed by apocalyptic thoughts and images. Concretely, we can meaningfully think ahead three perhaps four generations. The apocalyptic is but a nifty alibi for avoiding that.”
Apocalypse is one of my favorite words. It comes from the root, “uncover.” Of course, winter is not a season of uncovering. In fact—-and gratefully—most everything is actually covered. In snow! In coats and hats and scarves!
Perhaps the preoccupation with space is actually a preoccupation with heaven. In that case, I think of Confucius: “I do not speak. Does Heaven speak?” And I think of Ben: “Heaven is on earth.” And I think of Lana Del Ray: “Heaven is a place on earth with you.”
I am quietly elated to have a poem in the most recent issue of POETRY. I’d typed out what the poem is “about” but truly, that part doesn’t really matter whatsoever. Other than to say: the land where I live often feels different than the world where I live.
My habits of collecting digital gold tokens has been retired for the past month’s season of extended Sabbath; I’ll return to it, probably. Or I won’t, and I’ll write more than I collect.
My word of the year is deliberate but it’s actually love. My card of the year is the Page of Pentacles. I’m using prayer as a practice, I’m going to see the whales, I’m treating the void as my path, I’m drinking champagne, and I’m rowing boats. I’m cathedral thinking. I’m in the small world with the large sky.