Beginning a new calendar year in mindfulness and silence is my preferred method of ringing in the next twelve months. Coupled with some industrious (for me) efforts and rituals, the day starts in quiet form. While Andy sleeps, I steam the outfit I’m wearing for a family dinner, prepare the roasted squash we’re bringing as a side dish, make myself a cup of oolong tea, and settle down at the dining room table to write this blog post. Trying to keep my mind focused wholly on the simple tasks at hand, I push away any nagging overthinking or mental analysis and attempt to inhabit the moment completely. For many people, silence and quiet is an immediate invitation for thoughts to run wild through the mind – for me, it invites the opportunity to focus on my breathing, or the simple act of making a cup of tea or cutting up vegetables.
I pause and look at the outside world – slightly hazy, a fine mist and maybe even rain in the air, droplets of water on bare tree branches, like little silver buds of a spring that will, no matter what befalls us, come again. Cradling the cup of tea in my hands, I embrace its warmth while surveying the gray winter scene of our backyard. The fountain grass bows with crooked countenance, stalks of the cup plant splay as if they’d been trampled by some giant, and a fluffy squirrel perches on the corner post of our weathered fence. Which way will it decide to go? Which way will the year take us?
The cup of tea grows cool, no matter how piping hot it was when I began writing this. Tea tempers itself, something I’ve learned to do, on occasion, over the years. Tastes have mellowed and sharpened, in the contradictory terms that life decrees at its most infuriating. Holding such extremes when they seem at such odds is a Zen trick we can only ever approximate mastering. The action verbs that started the sentences when I started this blog post are now coming at the end, a shift worth noting and honoring. Let’s begin.
