My Jewish friends see this week as the beginning of a new year. I am on the outside of the celebrations, and since I don’t really know what’s going on, I’ve made my own completely unorthodox, and unblessed version And as a new year beginning now is not a part of my heritage, I feel free to take liberties with its significance. I make a choice to see it as less of a shared event and more of a time to take a breath, to be with what the passing year has brought.
To say it another way, rather than celebrating the out with the old and in with the new of January First, I love the thought of a year beginning with the harvest, with gathering all the goodness of the passing year and using that richness to launch forward into what is to come.
I look as well at what I choose to leave behind. Enmities in all their forms, unforgiveness, regrets, losses, fears. In doing this, I see them for what they are–burdens that do not serve.