I re-started 2024 today. But it's already 12 days in, you may well observe. And so it is.
I started 2024 on schedule, and in London too, thanks to my sons' present of tickets for a family trip to My Neighbour Totoro on New Year's Eve afternoon. It was a spectacularly wonderful, life-affirming production. After the show, I checked my phone - my goddaughter had sent me a message letting me know that Day 1 of Adriene's 30 Days of Yoga 2024 would start on New Year's Day. I made my resolution - I enjoy Adriene's videos, and I've got out of the habit of bending and balancing.
The New Year's Eve fun continued when we went to Brasserie Zedel for dinner, as close an experience of Paris as you can get near to Piccadilly Circus. The young people went off to their various celebrations and my Longest-Serving Friend and I wandered through London's lights which were, it has to be said, several cuts above Shrewsbury's, and made sure bedtime was well before midnight. Next morning, we got up and did the Burgess Parkrun. That same New Year's evening, heading back home, my eldest son and his girlfriend shared news of their engagement which came about in the rock room of the Natural History Museum. Such an excellent arrangement of place, timing, metaphor, and materials. Such hopeful, shiny news.
Of course, going back to work on 2nd January has a habit of applying the brakes to New Year momentum. But in the not-work part of my life, I somehow, between all the loveliness of actual New Year and the getting into the business of a day-by-day new year, mislaid resolution. Resolution is (I hardly need to mention) a word which suggests resolve. And the word resolve suggests 'to decide firmly on a course of action' (Google English Dictionary). None of these (decide, firmly, course, action) were thoughts I could lay hold of in those following January days; it's been more a case of unresolve: indecision, apathy, physical and mental wobbliness.
It was poetry that resolved me. It was poetry in community, and wise, compassionate, playful, poetry at that. At Shrewsbury Poetry, we were lucky enough to host Philip Gross and Steve Griffiths for our first get together of the new year yesterday evening. Among our online poetry community, and among open mic poems which resonated and flowed with the thoughts and feelings emerging, Philip and Steve held a conversation. As with all remarkable conversations, this one shifted something for me.
If I were to pin the shift down to something, I'd pin it down to this. While Philip was reading his poem 'Of Breath (Thirteen Angels)' I visualised my lungs for the first time as wings ("don't look for it outside") unfurling with each breath. The poem came to me as a winged messenger through the black and white memories of my lungs, x-rayed when I was a child for damage after pneumonia. I could see myself now in full technicolor, complete with "pink and glistening cavities" breathing in oxygen, breathing in life, readying for the brief flight necessary to enter each moment, and this new year.
If I were to pin it down to something, this re-framing, it would be to this: I got up this morning, dusted off my yoga mat, sat cross-legged and breathed. And this breath has given me a sense of a voice which can "step to the body's window ledge and, briefly, fly".
Happy new year to you, dear reader. Keep breathing.
