Yesterday
I wrote, "On the second-to-last day of the year, I'm looking for ways to
sum up and let go. The morning has been
spent making gorgonzola wafers with piñon nuts, from my Santa Fe Kitchens cookbook; synching Carmina Burana to my iPod; reading Jane Hirshfield on Zen and
poetry, for inspiration; watching a whole bevy of birds delightedly splashing
in the bird baths once the ice melted.
I'd
like a ceremony of some sort, to mark the turning—whether a silent retreat at
Green Gulch, a night walk to the caves at Bandelier, a visit to Glastonbury's
Chalice Well, leis thrown out onto
the white waves at the Place of Refuge, which the sea turtles have come back to
over the years.
We'll
spend the last day of the year in Santa Cruz."
And
so we have begun it. (Sunshine and the
sound of water.)
On
the last day of the year, over the years, I’ve liked to climb up to the line of
caves at Tsankawi and sit facing the sun, then on the way home buy red wine
tasting of the Provence earth from Kokoman on the Pojoaque reservation. Or eat cracked crab with a smidgen of
prosciutto and some lemon-pepper linguini, while summoning good friends from
books, the word-artists and sages. Or sit
looking out across Keauhou Bay, the birthplace of the stillborn king, and
reinvent myself; set off above the ocean a flurry of Chinese fireworks with
charming names.
At
Tsankawi—which in Tewa means "village between two canyons at the clump of
sharp, round cacti"—I found the year and years like petroglyphs written on
the long sandstone cliffs all around me. I always asked myself there why I didn't stay
in Santa Fe, work for the School of American Research, be a real artist? Live in the canyons? Closer to myself. To the vital red earth. I'd press my hand print into the cold snow;
pick an indigo berry from a juniper tree and crush it in my fingers to release
its inner nature and transfer to my own skin the vivid, spicy fragrance of the
juniper that is so quintessentially of that place, and of me.
On
the Kona Coast, over the years, I wrote my end-of-year notes time and time
again. Whether idly, or querying; happy
or -un.
Yellow
fish in the curl of a wave.
An
empty bottle of New Zealand lager, and an unspent Roman candle.
I
wrote: "Recently somebody said 'you
have to re-invent yourself from time to time'—and when more naturally than at
the start of a new year? Somehow I'm
always conscious of 'taking stock' in Hawaii, of re-defining (if not out &
out reinventing) what is most and best me;
though that tends to get lost almost immediately back in the daily grind.
"We
always go to the Place of Refuge, a sacred place on a perfect white
palm-circled beach, where those who had broken the kapu (sacred rules of life) and offended the gods, or defeated warriors,
or noncombatants, could find sanctuary, cleansing, and new life—so to visit
seems appropriate for the process of personal renewal. A place for second chances.
This
time we also walked along the beach to the hotel, now abandoned and ruinous,
where I stayed four or six years ago and—in this same effort at re-defining—took
my coffee out, mornings, to the black rocks of ruined temples, and mirror-still
tidepools, to write and think and read Robert Browning's poems. The image of an empty hotel (and that one, mine, particularly) is unsettling—maybe
because it's so intrinsically contradictory.
Am
I like a sea creature, then, that moves on from one borrowed shell to
another? Is it only the shells that are ever re-defined? The stones of the old temples piled now into
sea-walls instead, and in another year fallen again and awash with rock-crabs?"
Again,
another year:
"The
Chinese fireworks have better names than ever:
Successive Happy News
Overlord in the Sky
Mandarin Duck Disporting Water
Monkey Driving
Bird in Fright (flight, instead, surely?)
Jasmin's Gun
And
the ponderous coils of firecrackers, one hundred thousand all on a strand."
And
that year or another, a collection of observations:
. The
fisherman with his empty bucket says, smiling, 'I guess we'll have sardines for
our supper.'
. Smoke
along the road to Kealakekua—chickens roasting, hundreds, barbecued, on spits.
. On
Thursday the dive boat has anchored offshore—strung with Christmas lights.
. On
Saturday morning they practice dancing, with the bamboo sticks.
. The
old Chinese man on the lawn between the Kona Inn and the ocean paints
ideographs, with a fat brush—I remember the sign for thinking within motion,
the self and the journey which is within.
. At
the Saturday farmers' market we buy a bagful of papayas and flowers— pink
ginger, orchids, mixed anthurium, $5.00.
. They
are fishing off the rocks. The volcano
has been taken by cloud.
. The
second boat whose mast is constant in my view of steeple, mast, and white
plumaria went out this morning with a striped sail.
. I
drink a dry white wine from the volcano.
Not as fine as Etna or the other volcanic whites, but surprisingly good.
. Dried
leis on the statue of the fish god—the walls of temples and the breakwater—all
lava, seaworn (the petroglyphs for crossing).
No
conclusions. No wise words to carry me
or us or anyone into the unwritten new year—only an offering and a blessing, an
awareness of what all has passed. And what
remains, enduringly, endearingly. Love
and delight in its myriad guises.
All happiness ahead, fellow voyagers and celebrants. Let us now invoke the New Year.
image: She Who Is, Invocation
