How About it, 2024?
Every 365 days, those of us who observe the Gregorian calendar celebrate the chance to renew ourselves. Despite anyone's belief in the tradition, we'll step into a new paradigm together as 2024 is born. Our life revolves around this calendar year...new trends announced by the fashion overlords, tax fluctuations, political cycles, and all those playdates and birthdays penned onto a fresh twelve months-worth of opportunity and history to be charted on our walls.
If only we could collectively step into it with the prospect of a fresh start, unfettered by prejudice or ill-will. To live together as citizens of our planet, compelled our human instincts to survive, thrive, and to protect this rotating mass of beauty and resources that makes us all one family of earthlings. Let us not make plans for Mars and worlds beyond before recognizing the potential of our relationship with this forgiving planet of ours. With the mystic of the new year afoot, there's a childlike hope in me that a new leaf is yet to be turned...one which could see the end of wars ripping the world and people apart. One in which there is the recognition that we depend on each other and this place. One in which division is understood as the seed of destruction of us as a people.
Even within the microcosm of our farmlife, on a day when the kids or we parents are at odds with each other, the mood is pervasive, killing our spirit and productivity. Like an insidious disease, the moving parts of this place fall out of alignment and we struggle through our day. Even the the puppies pick up on the energy and get after each other, bringing the discord to an interspecies level. It's when some semblance of harmony is restored that days sail by and we hardly feel like we're working as each of us finds our place in this circus of ours. That's when the romanticized idea that so many have of a family farm comes to life and we feel that so much is possible. We feel strong, and we feel that our momentum is a small contribution to spinning this world round.
It was my little wise owl of a sister which brought this idea to my attention the other day...that the seemingly small good bits are it and that the bigger problem could never be held within two hands. I think this is a fantastic proposition for prosperity...for people to accept that the immense problems of the world which overwhelm our news cycles and hearts could be dismantled by a conglomeration of individual efforts to live good lives inspired by compassion. Instead of being convinced that the world is beyond repair and every man is for himself as the contrived, fear-mongering narrative would have you believe, let us tap back into our innately human nature...interdependent in our cause as a species to thrive. And what a species we can be...with a capacity for love, incredible ingenuity and endowed with soul.
And this is where I feel in my heart that Rich and I have an answer to the question we sat with eight years ago: should we bring kids into this world? For it is in the eyes of May and Jack and a number of kids who cross my path which I see that potential for our world burning. Renewal. Let us look to our inner child and the foundation of our humanity for the way forward. Let us walk into the new year together in canary yellow (one proposed color of 2024) and be more childlike.
Happy New Year to you and yours.
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