goodbye 2011

"Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything,
That's how the light gets in."
-Leonard Cohen

This morning I'm thinking of all the updates received from friends and families over the last few weeks.  New babies, growing children, adjustments to life without a loved one, moves, new jobs, retirement, grandparenting.  The full gamut of life, full of cracks, always changing.

I'm thinking of this home where I spend early mornings lately by the tree, reading, reflecting, praying.  Lighting Advent candles, and now Christmas candles.  How grateful I am to have a quiet, warm place to reflect and write and read.  Rock and I often read to one another something that stood out particularly in our morning reading.  It's worship, I guess.

I remember other new year's eves.  Having friends over to the manse in the village of Wyoming.  Ringing the church bells at midnight.  Further back, I remember watching movies we weren't supposed to watch while my parents were out celebrating the new year.  Banging pots and pans and screaming, "HAPPY NEW YEAR!" through our porch screen to all our Lincoln Street neighbors.    Somewhere in the middle--making my way through a snowy labyrinth lit by candles at Holden Village in Washington state, and burning the year's regrets in a bonfire.

Rock and I never really know what we're going to do for new year's.  We may go into Rochester for dinner and a movie.  But what sounds more interesting to me this year is a walk in the woods and a bonfire.  It's strangely warm this year, like spring.  We can watch the flames grow and think about the way things keep changing.  The way love springs up out of nowhere, the way disease rears its ugly head unexpectedly, the cracks in everything.

Bennie might follow us into the woods.  He has a red and white collar around his neck these days with jingle bells on it.  C'mon ring those new year bells, Bennie!  It doesn't have to be a perfect celebration.  All of life is holy, cracks and all.  As Leonard says, that's how the light gets in.

Happy New Year, everyone!

It's a beautiful Advent, cold, clear evening here at Lagom Landing.  I took a walk behind the barn to the clearing where we had fires this summer, and watched the treetops silhouetted in the low light of the setting sun and rising moon.  Their skinny limbs, relieved of summer's leaves, clicked gently together in the breeze.  I held a tree limb, overcome with the peace of wild places.  The particular stillness that is always here in these woods, while we humans bustle around and shop and bake and overindulge during this Most Wonderful Time of the Year, hit me, yet again.  I heard the faint sound of cars driving on 390, and I thought about where I too often am instead of these woods, burning fossil fuels as I run from some important thing to another.  

I walked back to the house, my path lit by the moon.  The blue lights I had just attached to an extension cord glowed on our front porch.  I smelled the wood mulch I'd been spreading earlier this afternoon over slabs of cardboard.  We're sheet-mulching our yard, a technique used in permaculture, which I'm just learning about.  As I spread the mulch, I thought about how long it has taken to acquire the cardboard, to load up pickups full of wood mulch from a neighboring town dump, and to spread the mulch around at least one acre of land.  I thought about how long it will take for the yard surrounding our house to look welcoming and settled, as permaculture relies on the slow processes of nature.  I thought about Lagom Landing, and how these now more than two years have been.  I've had times of great anxiety that Rock and I don't have what it takes to start a nonprofit and host 10 students for a year--their meals, the program, the bills, the accidents, the conflicts, the liability, etc., as well as coordinate our service in the community and all that added complexity.  

But for the most part, Rock and I have received the slow, gentle message of one who is far greater than ourselves.   "Of course you are not enough," we are told; "None of my children are ever enough."  And we go back to trusting that a power is working in us and with us and despite us that will allow Lagom Landing to be what it is to be.

And so I think of Mary.  A child.  So frightened.  So overwhelmed.

But somehow, in her terror, saying, "Let it be with me according to your word."

Willingness is all we ask of our students.

At our better moments, it's all we ask of ourselves.

It's all we really need.