No big nor complicated resolutions this year, but I intend to be guided by two touchstones: beauty and blocks.
BEAUTY
Early one morning over the holidays, the sun caught the yellow ribbons on a piñata that my son had made at school. The way the ribbons shone held my attention and for a while everything paused, there was just the light, and the ribbons. When we’re surrounded by so much noise, and more unpredictability than ever, little moments of beauty like that have a particular power. They are everywhere but we often miss them. I’m hoping to hold them closer this year.
BLOCKS
Here I’m thinking of the building-block kind, rather than blockages, though the former of course can help un-block the latter. In a practical sense, breaking things down into chunks, which makes it easier to tackle them rather than looking right away for the connections between things which can lead to an endless sense of inter-relation and cause and effect. Another way to think about it is setting a window frame around a scene.
Then there’s all the creativity that comes from how different blocks do or don’t fit together, and from beginning to build a “whole”, or at least a narrative. Meaning that those connections are there and explored after all, but with a more solid grounding.
I’ll leave here a link to Louis MacNeice’s poem “Snow” which a cousin recently shared and I hadn’t read before (it made my day!). The poem plays with beauty, solidity, fluidity, separation and connection in a magnificent way.
Finally, for readers who are looking for reserves of strength in the face of climate change, read Rebecca Solnit’s “Ten Ways to Confront the Climate Crisis Without Loosing Hope”, which encompasses history, facts, imagination as a superpower... and beauty.