Welcoming the New Year of 2012

Several days ago during the week between Christmas and New Years, I was driving home after the gym.  I was listening to NPR's All Things Considered and heard this great story by Margot Adler, the NPR contributor and author of Drawing Down the Moon.  She detailed an event that occurs in New York City in Times Square every year a few days before New Years Eve.  People come from all over and write down things that they want to leave behind in the old year, things that they don't want to take into the new year.  People were writing down the names of ex-lovers, events, qualities of the present and/or past, that they wanted to let go of and be free of.  And then all of these things that people want to let go of are shredded, destroyed.  Margot Adler ended the story commenting that these types of rituals occur in most cultures all over the world in many different forms.

I loved this image and the simplicity of this act, this ritual.  I also thought about while this occurs in Times Square in NYC, it doesn't happen as a standard event in our culture.  I arrived home excited by the story and immediately began telling my other half about it.  We decided that we would do something similar for ourselves on New Years Eve.

And so, after an early movie and a delicious meal that we made together, we gathered in the living room with a pad of paper, a pen, a candle, and the cauldron.  We burned some sage to clear our minds and the space and began writing down the things that we wanted to let go of, things that we didn't want to bring into the new year.  We tore off these things in strips of paper, lit them on fire with the candle and placed the burning paper into the cauldron.  Most things we spoke aloud or let the other read; a few we kept to our selves and silently lit them. And then when we were done, we lit some more sage and tossed the smoking mass into the cauldron, letting the smoke swirl and rise and free us from these things on this last day of the year.

This has been a year of multiple deaths for me, that of my mother as well as two co-workers who committed suicide.  I realized that I really needed to let go of my anger towards Joe for taking his own life as it has been preventing me from truly mourning him and being able to access the fond memories that I have of him.  I also realized that my feelings that I should have done more for my mother, that I didn't do enough (regardless of signs of the contrary and reassurances by my loving partner), were keeping me from missing her.  And so I let these things go with the old year, that I may more fully embrace the loss that I feel in my life from their passings.

I also remembered the old saying that 'nature abhors a vacuum.'  So now, we have a new sheet of paper, one where we collect all of the things that we want to bring into our lives in this new year.  It sits on our altar with a pen as a work in progress.

Happy New Year!