Blessing for a new year | Daybreak Note #195 | Jan. 1, 2021
Today is an opportunity to look through the telescope of time and notice again how incredible it is to be living and loving on Earth.
Good morning, dear!
Welcome! We made it here, together, to 2021, a year that feels spectacularly sci-fi and yet humbly flawed and real. There is no robot to cook breakfast, but there is also no robot to cook breakfast — there is only us, standing over a stove, with eggs born from chickens we will never see, carried by people we will never meet, cracked in frying pans crafted in factories we will never enter, simmered in olive oil from trees in orchards we will never cross. And all savored by taste buds and turned into energy in cells in ways we can not fully know. Miracles abound in every bit of our living.
2020 was a hard year, and neither that suffering, nor the raging pandemic, will be erased today, on this simple Friday that turns our paper calendar. But today is an opportunity to look through the telescope of time and notice again how incredible it is to be living, and all the vast potential we have in loving and caring for ourselves and our world.
Yes, we humans make mistakes.
But we can also learn from our mistakes — and that gives me hope.
We can pick today — a day as good as any other, a day in which billions of human minds are attuned to hope and renewal — to vow to love more deeply and more wildly and varied than we might have ever imagined.
And we can renew that vow any day, and every day, over and over again.
With love,
Brianne
Blessing for a new year
May we greet 2021,
as we would any new day
with swells of gratitude
for this rare moment
on Earth, on a speck
in our grand universe
of black holes and stardust,
at a time unlike any other
in 13 billion years.
We are here together
on a spinning ball in vast space,
with planets around us
void of beating hearts.
Let us not forget,
as we are apt to do,
our very miracle of life.
Let us notice anew
— with incredulity! —
our own breath
rising and falling,
air funneling through
our human body,
the trillions of unbidden cells
toiling merrily in concert,
allowing us to feel,
to sense, to notice, to love.
Let us notice anew
— with astonishment! —
the mighty branches
on the grandfatherly oak tree,
the shy glimmer
of the day’s first rays of light,
the furious peck
of the chickadee,
the rumble of wind,
the world dancing
all around our bubble
powered by two tiny eyes.
Let us love and care,
and carry such examples —
as they are, inevitably —
in sight of our children,
our neighbors, our own
ever-watchful self,
and all those whom we
never notice
are indeed watching, too.
Let compassion multiply
through the faithful human reflex
to do as we see.
Let us rejoice in 2021,
in this miracle of living,
and love, love, love
in new ways,
in new heights,
in new spheres
together, together, together.
Beautiful. Just beautiful. As you are, too