In The Dying Hours of the Year

I read this Op-Ed in the New York Times and it reminded me of my usual thoughts on New Years (how for some reason I always expect to feel something a change as the old year dies and the new year ascends) so I'd thought I'd share it
New Year's Eve
At midnight tonight, the horses on this farm will age a year. That is the custom — every horse has the same birthday, Jan. 1. Like all things calendrical, this is a human convention. When it comes to equine conventions, I know enough to notice some of the simpler forms of precedence: who goes first through a gate, who gets to the grain feeder ahead of the others. But I can report that the horses make no fuss about their common birthday or the coming of the new year. Tonight, like any other, they will be standing, dozing on their feet, ears tipping back and forth at the slightest of sounds.

There is something deeply gratifying about joining the horses in their pasture a few minutes before the clock strikes 12 on New Year’s Eve. What makes the night exceptional, in their eyes and mine, is my presence among them, not the lapsing of an old year.

It’s worth standing out in the snow just to savor the anticlimax of midnight, just to acknowledge that out of the tens of millions of species on this planet, only one bothers to celebrate not the passing of time, but the way it has chosen to mark the passing of time. I remember the resolutions I made when I was younger. I find myself thinking that one way to describe nature is a realm where resolutions have no meaning.

It’s not that time isn’t passing or that the night doesn’t show it. The stars are wheeling around Polaris, and the sugar maples that frame the pasture are laying down another cellular increment in their annual rings. The geese stir in the poultry yard. A hemlock sheds its snow. No two nights are ever the same.

I always wonder what it would be like to belong to a species — just for a while — that isn’t so busy indexing its life, that lives wholly within the single long strand of its being. I will never have even an idea of what that’s like.

I know because when I stand among the horses tonight, I will feel a change once midnight has come. Some need will have vanished, and I will walk back to the house — lights burning, smoke coming from the wood stove — as if something had been accomplished, some episode closed.

I always/usually spend New Year's by myself-parties and stuff seem like forced frivolity and last year when I went to a rather sweet concert (Cat Power/Gnarls Barkley/Flaming Lips) at midnight I ended up exchanging tidings with a creepy random guy that reminded me of Danny Trejo- and tonight will be no different. I'm going to find a spot on Hermosa Beach with a pack of Camels and a bottle of Barbera d'Asti and just...be one with yet separate from the Cosmic as the waves keep crashing. forever and forever...
It is a wonderful thing,those moments of infiniteness.

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