Barefoot laureate: Ring out the false, ring in the true

This morning, a light rain is falling, fog is lifting, coffee is brewing and the year 2025 is gradually slipping away into the feathery realms of memory.

From there, 2025 will make its way into the wobbly books of history and eventually will fly headlong into the halls of antiquity.

Scientifically speaking, unlike equinoxes and solstices, nothing actually happens at the stroke of midnight on Jan. 1. Earth does not stutter or still, but continues her path around the sun just as she did the day before. The New Year is not a cosmic phenomenon but an entirely human invention, a miracle in its own rite — a social point of synchronization.

In our human world of clocks and calendars a particular digit flips and across the world, grand rituals are underway, culture is made visible and nostalgia for what has passed is linked with our hopes for the future.

If you think about it, New Year’s Eve is a brilliantly constructed yearly circadian event for civilization. And what’s more magical than the stroke of midnight?

The clock strikes and suddenly a collective acknowledgment of Time is underway, is wildly celebrated by millions of people. Somewhere a ball drops. Somewhere else a riverboat sings out tunes. Elsewhere, countless young lovers kiss for the first time. Here in the sticks outside  Palisade this year, as with most years, a few stalwart neighbors set off a couple fireworks to mark the event. The thumps in the near distance rouse those of us who’ve fallen asleep, reminding us that time is afoot.

The new year appears to have arrived right on time and strangely, poignantly,familiarly seems to be reminding me of our drunken revery and our melodic and melancholic shared humanity.

There is perhaps nothing more beautiful about New Year traditions than singing that old  standby, Auld Lang Syne, written by the Scottish poet, Robert Burns. Leave it to the poets to reminds us that all celebrations must include a grace note, a memento mori, a bit of duende, a reminder of sorrow and loss.

Yet another tradition of the New Year is the New Year ’s Resolution, a concept which persists because it is beautiful and hopeful and not because it is necessarily true to our experience. We humans are of course capable of change but personal change is rarely instant and tends to be slow and incremental, gathering meaning and healing as it goes.

Still, hope matters. Hopeful rituals matter. Trying to improve ourselves matters. And paying  attention to the passage of time matters, in large part because it offers us all opportunities for  reflection.

What are holidays, after all, but magnifiers of consciousness?

On New Year’s Day I was curled up on the couch reading a book and looked up just in time to  see a magnificent bald eagle gliding past just outside the window. Rushing to the window I  watched the great raptor circle back and around several times before disappearing in the valley to the north below.

It’s always thrilling to see an eagle but it felt especially noteworthy to see one on New Year’s morning. It was good to be reminded that the eagle is an eagle— and not just a symbol. I was reminded of an old eagle poem by Tennyson:

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands.

Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls.

And like a thunderbolt he falls.

And this is one of the great joys of poetry — I suddenly found myself remembering that my son, at the age of 8, had chosen this particular poem to learn by heart. That would have been more than 20 years ago now. Still standing at the window, my heart swelled with the memory of my little boy learning and reciting those words.

As I returned to the couch I found myself remembering another Tennyson poem — a New Year’s poem, actually —which contains the famous line: Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Those words stayed with me for the rest of the day. What better words could have come to me on New Year’s Day to accompany me into this new year? What better daily practice than to ring out the false, ring in the true? What better reminder to stay true and honest with myself and with others?

And so it was I adopted, not so much a resolution for the new year, but a practice of more mindfully seeking truth and ringing out the false.

In most cultures the passage of time has long been imagined as a straight line moving forward: clear, sharp, and unwavering. Yet we humans live in stories and metaphors and are always circling back through our own memories and traveling through our own emotional and spiritual ecosystems.

So it makes sense that the singular moment of the New Year which held my imagination and held all the magic and mystery of the passage of time and the New Year came to me this year on the outstretched wings of an eagle.

Wendy Videlock lives at the foot of a mesa in Western Colorado. Her books are available wherever books are sold. Reach her at westernslopeword@gmail.com.