Creation: Something new begins to emerge
The new thing here is my my new secular “New Year Advent”, an idea I mentioned as a joke in a previous post. The more I thought about it, the more I liked doing something ritualistic to mark the end of the past year and the arrival of the new.
I decided to run it from December 25th through January 1st, which is actually eight days. This time frame overlaps with Christmas (December 25th), Boxing Day (December 26th), and Kwanzaa (December 26th through January 1st). But those are celebrations of specific communities (Christians and African-Americans, respectively), neither of which I belong to and neither of which I wish to appropriate.
I’m going to focus each day on a theme, and I haven’t really thought this out or planned it carefully so there may be some ad hoc revisions. My goal is to give myself a framework for processing through my emotions in a healthy way leading up the first day the of new year.
Today’s theme is pulled from both old Yule mid winter celebrations and, yes, Christmas: Creation. Birth is an act of creation and the falling off of winter into spring signals the rebirth of nature, so it seemed apt.
I like the idea of creation as an act of renewal; it doesn’t “just happen” but it also happens every day. I suppose one can look at this as a moment of pure birth (a human being born) or as a potential for growth (a seed being planted). Both rely on faith in the natural order of life and death, and creation is truly one of the great magical powers of the human mind: art, music, and stories are testament to our powers of creation.
Today, while people are either ignoring the holiday or running around in a hurried rush to fulfill family obligations, I’m going to ruminate on what I have spent my creative energies on over the past year, and what I want to create for 2017.