the aulde new year

Naomi Shihab Nye, “Burning the Old Year”
 
Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.
 
So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.
 
Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.
 
Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.

Naomi Shihab Nye, “Burning the Old Year” from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Portland, Oregon: Far Corner Books, 1995). Copyright © 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
 
 
Tracy K. Smith, “An Old Story”
 
We were made to understand it would be
Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge,
Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind.
 
Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful
Dream. The worst in us having taken over
And broken the rest utterly down.
 
A long age
Passed. When at last we knew how little
Would survive us—how little we had mended
 
Or built that was not now lost—something
Large and old awoke. And then our singing
Brought on a different manner of weather.
 
Then animals long believed gone crept down
From trees. We took new stock of one another.
We wept to be reminded of such color.

Tracy K. Smith, “An Old Story” from Wade in the Water. Copyright © 2018 by Tracy K. Smith. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org.
 
 
POETIC THEMES
            Ah, New Year’s Day: Lucy with the football. All of us experience at times a sense of staleness in the routines of our daily life, the monotony of our psychological issues, the desire to wake up as new. January first, even if it’s a fake-out, marks at least the hope for renewal. If you’re hunting around for a poetic reflection of the earnest, hopeful resolutions we make each January, you might go back to the wild and wooly list of “what you shall do” in Whitman’s preface to Leaves of Grass. But now that I’m mentioning dead white guys, I’m thinking instead of the sober ending of Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” set in this dark time of year: “A condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything.)” This might be more in keeping with the reality of a pandemic age. The tortured five sections show a man haunted by virtue misunderstood, bungling action, folly, mistaken humor, and harm done. By the end of the poem the midwinter fire has refined all of it, burning the speaker down to simple. Part of our own refining process is the collapse of time back to source, and the ouroboros of future and past in coming to know presence: “What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning. / The end is where we start from.” To honor this week as the meeting place of beginnings and endings, let’s abandon the old and turn to some more current poems on how past and future intermingle. Maybe we could find a new way to explore the simple, somewhat broken hope of the New Year: that we could be different.
            In Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Burning the Old Year” the old and the new are like two sticks that, when rubbed together, create a kind of burning friction. We are called closer to the flames to reconsider loss, regret, and what simple elemental truths stay around. Turning something material into sheer air is not just subtraction—beginning again “with the smallest numbers”—but distillation, separating the flammable from the enduring (and sparse) stone. It reframes what kinds of things we can celebrate, teaching us to reimagine even the most devastating loss as capable of creating a new open space for potential. When we are contracted in on ourselves, burdened, crowded in, there’s a need for mental/psychological space to breathe. With so much flammable material in the course of a year, we are invited to distill our lives down to what’s most real. And something else remains: the ominous crackling that also hangs around “after the blazing dies” is what we have not done. Regret lingers.
            Tracy K. Smith’s meditation is about something slower. The rebirth of old phenomena in a new form is like the reappearance of a soul in a Garcia Marquez novel. The slow undergrowth of invisible things eventually emerges. Sea changes over decades and centuries can soften even the most “rageful dream.” We need something “large and old” to handle what we’ve been handed. Smith’s epic, livid, broken land seems more like a description of Sumerian or Egyptian myth than a modern-day city. And with plagues, fires, and tornados, these days we actually seem to be in some kind of Biblical old story. So can we stagger dazed through the heart of winter, anticipating the possibility of green again? The concluding line—“We wept to be reminded of such color”—leaves us with a reminder of how we can be moved by all that is familiar, as it courses through new beginnings. Humanity has made it through plagues before; how can we be changed after this time of destruction? Ours is a fragile, urgent kind of hope.

 
PRACTICE
            One popular lesson in teaching Sanskrit is to place dukkha, or suffering, in relationship to sukha, which translates to mean not just sweetness, but also space. Yogic practices offer some ways to approach the turning of the calendar year as purification—burning up what’s stale and ready for release to make space for the new. But also there’s the potential reincarnation of the old in new form. These themes give us plenty of work to do physically, although not necessarily the easiest or most relaxing work. Targeting the solar plexus, the seat of digestive fire in the body, might help us channel the element’s purifying properties. A kriya, or cleansing technique, called “Breath of Fire” by yoga practitioners (at least in America) builds heat in the solar plexus and then disperses it to create new spaciousness. A way of stoking the fire is to add a challenge to big muscles like quadriceps and “glutes” (your butt). You could stand in “chair pose,” with knees bent and torso angled forward on the high diagonal or place your back against a wall as though sitting in a chair, with knees bent as close to 90 degrees as possible. Depending on the intensity appropriate for your body (google counter-indications if you’re unsure, but best to listen to and honor your body’s responses), you might practice pumping air in a punctuated rhythm in and out of the nostrils, feeling the solar plexus snap back toward the spine with each exhalation. To up the challenge, you could amp up to a quicker pace. 
          Notice, when focusing on what you’re ready to burn up, which moments, people, actions, or qualities come to mind. Heat is considered a somatic expression of anger, so keep tabs on your internal temperature: if swollen hate rises like Smith’s “epic wind,” take a break. Pause to listen to anger’s message, often a wise part of you requesting some kind of change. Based on the associations that rise to mind, discern whether to fan the flames or to squelch the fire. You can do the latter by straightening your legs and imaginatively saturating the chest cavity with the greenest of greens. Imagine a coloring book, and you’re filling in all the tubular branches of your lungs with your very favorite shade of green.
            When you feel well-cooked but not burned out, slow down your breath practice and fold forward at the waist, flooding the brain. I like to imagine (to mix my metaphors) cleaning a dirty fish tank: after the breath practice churns the stale water, the forward fold feels like dumping out all the gunky, swirling algae into the earth. Observe any imagery sparked by this inversion practice, and be sure to stretch out your quadriceps or any other “hot spot” before coming to relax and allow the breath and pulse to regulate. Is there any renewed sense of internal space? If so, what parts of you remain after the fire? Metaphorically speaking, wait for the soft little animals in your psyche to come back out, perhaps welcoming them with names.