“Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come,
Whispering ‘it will be happier’…” – Alfred Lord Tennyson

My New Year’s Wish?

I hope that in 2016, I make many mistakes. If I am making mistakes, it means I am learning, living, loving, thinking creating, growing, creativity. It means I am alive. I have never cared for the company of people who never makes mistakes. They know nothing, they are hollow.

I hope that in this year to come, we all make mistakes, acknowledge them, and let go of them.

Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before. And you are doing things.

As always, in my endless and obnoxious pursuit of meaning, I have found some, I have only to look and think. The Pagan Book Of Days says that New Year’s Eve commemorates the solar divinity, Hogmagog.

Traditional festivities – sounds familiar here at the farm – include dressing in the hides and horns of animals (we do it all the time). Also “guising,” or the burning and smoking of sticks (called Hogmanays) to ward off evil sprites, and let in good spirits for the New Year. Also the eating of special cakes. My wife will love this holiday.

At the very moment of the new year, doors are opened and utensils rattled to drive off the last psychic vestiges of the old year and welcome the new, this Scottish chant was sung:

Get up, good wife, and shake your feathers,

   And dinna think that we are beggars,

  For we are bairns [babes] come out to play,

 Get up and gie’us our Hogmanay.

The idea of Maria shaking her feathers makes more sense to me than the ball dropping in Times Square, or the parties of scheduled joy. Whatever your poison, I hope it works for you.

This holiday season is forging a new spiritual and religious identity for me, a cross between mystical Judaism, Quakerism, the good and true Christianity of Jesus, and the paganism that marks my life, marriage and farm. Paganism is the religion of Mother Earth, it is widely practiced around this farm. I love this mix.

In this context, I guess the night does have meaning for me, most of all, I love the idea of opening my mind for the New Year and living it well and honestly.

I had a good and productive year, but I do like the idea of driving off the last psychic vestiges of the old 2015, and opening up our hearts and souls and minds for the new year just hours away. I reject nostalgia in all of its sappy forms, it is a trap. My life is in the present and the future, not the past.

I wish for myself the same thing I wish every day – a meaningful life filled with love and purpose and affirmation and creativity and friendship and accomplishment.

For me, this doesn’t need to be said, but it can’t ever hurt. I wish everyone a happy Hogmagog.

Get up and shake your feathers.