A little prayer

Dear friend,

I’m on a train back to Seattle after a day in Portland, sitting in a dimly-lit dining car while the Coast Starlight makes its way through small towns, the dark water to our left. Because dining service has ended, there’s no one in here but me.

I spent the first several years of my life in a country that celebrates the new year in September. For us, the new year is also a time for fresh flowers, because September is our Spring. The fields are bright with marigolds and children, especially little girls, draw flowers on paper to give out to people, going door to door to sing songs in exchange for a little treat. We call it Enkutatash, and even now the very name of it makes my heart sing. It was my favorite holiday. And so, I never really got around to feeling much about this other new year. It has never felt like a real holiday to me, let alone a true marker of the new year. It feels like a decision that was made and we go along with it. But of course, my beloved Enkutatash is also just arbitrary, is it not? Even more so, I guess, because at least with this new year the whole world agrees that when the clock strikes midnight on December 31, the year will move from 2023 to 2024. But not in Ethiopia. My stubborn little homeland insists that the year is 2016 and it doesn’t change on January 1.

Still, and because I live here and not there, I have some wishes for you and me.

I hope that you will have time. Time to move slowly and to savor the moments that actually matter. Time to hug longer. Time to be with yourself. Time to talk about the little things. Time for a walk with someone who matters to you. Time to cook a meal. Time for a story here and there. I hope that your time is yours to waste, because that is really when you’re using your time.

I hope that you will have peace. Peace in your heart and in your body, peace in your mind, peace in your interactions with those in your life. Peace in the meeting between the things you do and the person you want to be.

I hope that you will have hope. Hope that we can come out of this darkenss and into the light. Hope that you have the strength and the courage to do the thing that feels imposible. Hope that you can be there in someone else’s life, to affirm them when they need. Hope that they will also be there for you.

We are very small indeed, and we do not live for long. So, as Mary Oliver urged in Invitation, it really is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in a broken world. I hate to be a downer but I do believe that we are in a sort of dark age right now and I fear it will only get darker before our renaissaince. I hope there will be a renaissaince.

There is a passage in one of my favorite books that comes back to me often. I’d like to share it with you now:

Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times.

- Octavia E. Butler, The Parable of the Sower

Thank you for being here, and I hope the days are kind to you.

Lidiya