The Sum of all my Baggage

Welcome 2018. Happy new year!

That said. I've already had my New Year, filled with all the pomp and circumstance that Rosh Hashanah can hold. Except this year, I was a little too preoccupied to notice much of anything, except that too-sharp focus of hospital sounds and silences. There was grief to be felt, and family to be held close. There was a miracle of healing, even within that circle of dying. 

Even missing that new year, we Jews do it right and manage to celebrate four new years throughout the course of asingle  365 days plus a smidge cycle. In addition to the hoopla of Rosh Hashanah and the birthday of the world, we celebrate the new year of trees, the reign of kings, and the tithing of cattle. We have a full service concept of years, old and new and everything in between.

Time is less a linear function, and more something with rounded edges. Today may be a beginning, and yesterday an ending, but those concepts tend to be muteable. The line between them is less engraved in stone and much more drawn in pencil. Or eraseable ink.

Never one to waste an opportunity, I will use any excuse for demarcation to, well, mark the journey. I will gladly use these perhaps arbitrary, possibly holy  and certainly randomly awesome moments to do a little diving, a little reflecting. I declare this day, this arbitrary day of firsts, to bend the light a little more, and so enter this new year a little more solidly. A bit more knowingly.

So to begin, at this beginning (at every beginning) I pause, and take a moment or three to ask my favorite question: what do I carry withme , and what do I  leave behind? I am the sum of all my baggage - carried, dragged, dropped. left behind and taken back.

Sometimes the weight of it all is crushing. And sometimes, when the wind is just right, and the scent of green is in the air, and I am feeling brave and grateful daring and fierce and bold (or any combination thereof; you get the point), there's no weight at all. I freely offer much of my baggage, all the weighted measures of stuff and ideas and hurts and pains; lost loves and lost jobs, missed opportunities and failed connections - all of the stuff that binds me, tethers me to a present I can only see through the funhouse mirror of my past (so not really a present at all) - and I let it all go, leaving it lie in a muddled heap.

This is my altar. I'm pretty sure, when I drop it all in that heap, and I set it on fire, it makes a pleasing odor to God. I'm just as sure, when it's time to move on, every single thing that went up in smoke, that released me from the bondage of my self, and my past, it's all there, ready for me to pick up again, just as bright and shiny and unscathed as it was before my metaphorical sacrifice.

It's mine, to carry it all again until the next holy bonfire.

Of course, there's a whole bunch of other stuff I can choose to pick up and carry away - things like faith, or courage, or joy. And yes, there are infinite variations of despair and anger and sundry slings and arrows of cruel misfortune that can be distracting and enticing. And yes, I have gone that route more often than I care to admit. There are times I swear I didn't do the picking, that these nasty little packages leaped up and stuck themselves to me of their own accord, really they did.

If I'm honest - and now's a good time to cop to honesty - I did the picking and the plucking and the sticking, all by myself. Ugh.

Still, there are times I go against type, and I choose the weightlessness of joy!

Things is - all this carrying and leaving and taking away - it's a thing I can do every single day. It's unbounded and knows no season. It's not tied to any new year - or maybe, it's tied to every new year, every new day that dawns begins the cycle of a new year. In every moment, I can choose, again and again and again. I can leave it all, burn it up, dip it in amber, take it with me every single, any single day. These days, this journey is a mindful trudge, and so I make a careful inspection and collection of the junk I lug around with me. I am grateful for the mindfulness. Messy as I am, I like frames, and this is a particularly good one.

So. What is it that I carry with me? What will I leave behind? What will I carry with me as I walk to the next altar, the next mountain? Today - just for this moment, this breath, I will sit for a moment, my treasures laid out before me, a sky of pewter and pearl above me, casting dull shadows on the lot. I will sit, and rest, and hope - hope that when I move on from here, I remember to let slip the boxes of pain and fear, so that I have room for a bit of joy, a bit of beauty, a bit of grace.

Happy new year to all I love and hold so very dear. To beginnings and endings and all this lovely, messy, beautiful middle.