It is good, I feel, to begin a new year, or a new day, with a little reservoir of gladness. Here are some gladnesses I have gathered, and two new bird divinations I have made, as a conscious way of consecrating our days with the blessed fact that we weren't promised any of this — that the universe didn't owe us mountains and music, that we didn't have to be born, and yet here we are with our physics and our poems and our ever-breaking, ever broadening hearts.
Wood thrush divination from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.
Bless the last aspen leaf, waving at the tip of the skeletal branch like a bright yellow flag of resistance to gravity and time, beckoning an allegiance to life.
Bless gravity for how indiscriminately it gives itself to a mote of dust and to a mountain, for how it keeps every single celestial body in orbit for this perfect cosmos to cohere, for how it presses your lover's body against you to gladden the skin of the soul.
Bless the person who broke your heart to keep their own from breaking on the hard edge of the courage called love.
Bless paper for the way it can kindle a campfire and a revolution, for the delicious confusion of cedar and velvet at the tip of your finger each time you turn the page, for its whispered promise that when all the empires of silicon and bit go the way of Babylon and Rome, it will remain the keeper of our stories.
Bless table tennis for its absurd delight, for the boyish smile on the wrinkled face of the man at the rec center as he props his cane against the wall to pick up the paddle.
Bless blue, for making the bluebird and the sky it flies through what they are.
Bless consciousness, for making blue different to me than it is to you.
Bless mathematics for giving a ballot its weight and Bach his Goldberg Variations.
Bless the clouds, the way they drift across the sky like the thought bubbles of birds, the way they cast a spell against indifference each time they awn the setting sun.
Hummingbird divination from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.
Bless chance for how, across the billions upon billions of tiny and terrific events stretching all the way back to the first particle collisions in the first stars, events each one of which could have gone differently, it sang the bright clear note of you over the din of otherwise.
Bless time, for how despite all its blessed and blessing indifference, it gave the aspen leaf that little extra bit to blaze and gave us, each and every one of us alive, this symphonic interlude between the eternal silence of not yet and never again.
Bless the stranger at the bookstore who suddenly smiles the smile, the exact smile, of my dead friend, as if to remind me that nothing we love is ever dead, that love is the smile that saves life from mere existence.
Bless every grain of sand that made the glass that made binoculars to reveal the cormorant's dazzling rimmed eye the color of Uranus and telescopes to reveal the nebula three thousand lightyears away looking back at us like a giant cosmic iris with its secret knowledge of what we are.
Bless knowledge, all the species of it — how the small black seed knows to break into the Fibonacci spiral of a sunflower, how we know that when the house burns down and the tyrant takes office and the toe pokes through the last good sock, we still have each other.
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