2019: “Let it go…”

Here we are. Plunged into a new year. The beginning of a new decade. An election year that promises to be alive with drama, any way you slice it.

The sense one has is not of an ending, rather of a beginning. The possibility of (perhaps) “starting fresh.”

Each year I order a black leather Letts Diary from London. The pages are stiff, and the gold-edged pages stick together when I lift it from the box and pull it open for the first time. It has the feel and smell of a new book, a combination of the paper, the printing and the soft leather.

Calmly, with beautiful penmanship, I note the first few entries. Eventually, by year’s end, there are tea stains on several of the pages, notes in pencil that are impossible to read or even decipher and a binding that is pulling apart. Diaries must absorb the events of the year. It isn’t always easy.

Traditions are important to me. Traditions that link family, friends and the past together. Ever so briefly.

My New Year’s traditions are based in Manhattan, my home for over forty-five years. On New Year’s Eve, I walk through Central Park to the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine for the annual New Year’s Eve Concert for Peace founded by Leonard Bernstein in 1984. There are performances by the Cathedral Choir and Orchestra, Paul Winter, Judy Collins, Janet Pittman, Jason Robert Brown, and David Briggs.

The program ends with each individual seated in the nave, at a number approaching 4,000 people, holding a candle that we light one from another until the Cathedral glows from the twinkling lights. We sing, as one, “This Little Light of Mine,” and then walk out into the black night. The new year now just a few hours away.

On New Year’s Day, I gather with friends in the East Village for brunch before spending the afternoon at St. Mark’s Church for the annual, first held in 1974, Poetry Marathon sponsored by the Poetry Project. From 2:00 in the afternoon until midnight poets and musicians, one after another, stand up and read a poem or perform. Well-known published poets and musicians and individuals who are hoping against hope to one day be published.

On the Sunday evening before New Year’s, the quiet spot between holidays, I traveled on the F train to Jackson Heights in Queens to meet a friend for dinner. Her family was forced out of Tibet before her birth and she spent her childhood in a refugee camp in India. Before coming to the United States, she studied in Japan and worked with the Dalai Lama. What a joy to spend the evening with her dining on Tibetan dumplings, followed by overly sweet pudding from India. Her smile and the grace that exudes from her calm nature are an inspiration and felt by everyone who knows her.

When we sat down, she thrust a bouquet into my arms and said: “Let it go. Just let it go.”

I can’t recall what we were talking about, specifically. As I heard the words, I thought about 2019. The joy, the anger, the happiness, the fear, the profound sadness.

“Just let it go.”

May your new year, 2020, be filled with the peace and beauty that we often encounter unexpectedly. Consider these feelings found objects. Keep them on your shelf.

Everything else: “Just let it go.”

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Elizabeth Howard is an author and journalist. Her books include: Ned O’Gorman: A Glance Back, a book she edited (Easton Studio Press, 2016), A Day with Bonefish Joe (David R. Godine, 2015), and Queen Anne’s Lace and Wild Blackberry Pie, (Thornwillow Press, 2011). You can send her a note at: Elizabeth@laconiadailysun.com.