It is New Year’s Eve in the US, an erstwhile flipping of the calendar which offers more old symbolism than fresh content as almost all of what we have done – and failed to do – in 2023 will carry forth into 2024. There is no flipping here so much as dragging, dragging behind us elements of a year which for many was less than they had hoped and for others more fraught with violence and despair then we “civilized” humans should ever tolerate.
For some the past year also brought about reminders of how little we humans seem to have the capacity to shift our present course. We have invented shiny new tools to generate vast amounts of both wealth and disinformation. But beyond the realm of the technological, and surely in the realm of politics and policy, we have often offered more lip-service than tangible progress such as when organizing massive, cost-ineffective international conferences only to witness more global warning, more food insecurity, more violence in more places.
Moreover, we have still not demonstrated the political courage needed to place the aspirations of global youth and the multiply vulnerable on a par with our own. We have willingly kicked multiple cans down the road, leaving to our children the task of making urgent changes in the midst of crises we could well have resolved — in part if not in full — in our own time. We have closed the curtains so as not to be worldly distracted from our more repetitive, domiciled distractions.
None of this is news to those of you who still read these posts. But what to do about this? What to do (for us at least) about the prospect of another year of polarized politics across national entities, of diplomatic statements by the thousands largely lacking self-awareness, urgency or inspiration, characterized by responsibility frequently projected but rarely assumed?
It is all that many young people can do to maintain their belief that “life is NOT a joke,” that it is worth trying, worth deferring, worth caring. The relative cynicism and indifference of our age has clearly and much too often been visited on the young.
In response and in my own small way, what I try to do in these posts is to highlight “takeaways,” images or ideas that might stick with people long after they have logged off this blog. The quotations which often adorn the front sections of these pieces are designed for that purpose. You might have little use for what I have to say but also might have your week’s enthusiasm salvaged by excerpts from the accumulated wisdom of women and men who have struggled – in their time and ours – to reinforce the value of arising from slumber and facing life’s challenges, those which affect us directly and those not.
Today’s wisdom appropriate for this calendar flipping comes from Rilke’s “Book of Hours,” lovingly translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. Among the glorious and passionate imagery in these poems, especially in the “Pilgrimage” section, I have been most captivated by the image of ripening (reift). For indeed, despite the calling of great minds and artists in diverse cultures and over many generations, we have surely, by temperament and intent, remained an unripe species, stubbornly clinging to familiar vines and branches, refusing to mature as we were intended to mature, even taking pride in the metaphorical hardness generally characteristic of the unripe.
As Rilke reminds, we as a species continue to “entangle ourselves in knots of our own making,” knots which in essence cut ourselves off from the nutrients which ripeness requires. Thus we continue our collective struggle, increasingly lonely and confused, scratching our heads as we seek to discern how yet another “well-meaning” policy has crashed and burned, how a species with so many reminding us of our potential for caring and justice could routinely practice such cruelty and indifference.
Folks, we can choose to make this the year to untie the knots and allow our species to ripen, to become what we were intended to become, what we must urgently become if our children and their children are to have a fighting chance of life as we know it. This can be the year to ripen and then to harvest the best of us. Let us strive to make it so.
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