New Year

Wild Geese – Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

_____________________________________________

I’m not a fan of New Year at the best of times and I think it was fairly inevitable that I would find this one hard. The prospect of a Christmas without Kai or a significant other had left me feeling empty and vulnerable and prone to rushing into, and out of, things I probably should have been sensible enough to leave alone until I was in a slightly more together place. And so yesterday saw me a little puddly mess for most of the day, my pillows becoming a pathetically self-pitying Roshach test-like splodge of mascara on white linen, cross with myself and feeling hopeless and lost, vowing that the best thing all round would be to shut myself off from life where I couldn’t fall over any more or hurt anyone.

Until, that is, I thought, sod this. I’m not seeing in 2012, my brand new year, sniffing into my duvet feeling sorry for myself.

I don’t have to be good or walk, penitently, on my knees, like the words of my favourite Mary Oliver poem above say, the memory of which becoming, somehow, my one coherent thought through all of my silly panics last night. I don’t have to do anything new or different or reinvent myself or deny everything I am. I don’t need resolutions because I’m already living and loving and adventuring just fine. I just have to let the soft animal of my body love what it loves, because that’s who I am and that’s what I do best. I just need to be brave, basically, which of course is what I’ve always known. Silly girl, are you listening to yourself?

Determined nose-wiping turned into making a cup of tea and washing my face. And that lead to the impulsive one-click buying of some new books of poetry (I know, and you think your New Year was wild, huh? I bought POETRY). But that wasn’t enough. That was an everyday kind of recovery, god only knows I’m well practised at it. But this was New Year. I needed to think bigger, jump further.

So on the stroke of midnight I clicked the final ‘confirm’ on flights to Jersey in two weeks, my first proper solo trip away. Jersey, where my Grandma ventured on her own when she was my age after the war, and where I fully intend to see in my 30th birthday sat on a beach, wrapped up warm, looking at the stars, because I can.

I am not afraid of being alone because the world offers itself to my imagination. This year I will draw it and paint it and watch it and soak in every last bit of it and take it by the hand and spin it round and round. I am not afraid.

Happy New Year.

(P.S. Hotel has free Wi-Fi, so you’re coming too)

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