In 2005, I read Joan Didion’s “Year of Magical thinking.” I didn’t get it. Not really. Didion’s personal tragedy was so far removed from my own life at the time shimmering with promise. My husband was still alive, and our little girl had just started the 3rd grade.
Some years later, I reread the book. This time, I got it. By then, I had been shattered by a breast cancer diagnosis. Newly widowed and overwhelmed by a grief for which there are still no adequate words, I too lived a year of “magical thinking,” persisting with little rituals and obsessions, pretensions that, together, helped me move forward to an uncertain future. Yes, it was a kind of madness.
Perusing the images out of Los Angeles in recent days, I am reminded again of Joan Didion. She is the writer wholly responsible for shaping my fascination with Southern California. While hers is an incomplete portrait of Los Angeles, it is nonetheless the one that has stayed with me since I was a young woman, stepping into the world with all boldness.
In a second-hand paperback copy of her 1968 Slouching Toward Bethlehem, I first learned of the Santa Ana winds. “It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows,” she wrote. It is the season of fire.
It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself. Nathaniel West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust, and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.
It is so difficult to see the edge when there’s an empty space where your life used to be.
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Dangerous pavements… But this year I face the ice with my father’s stick ~ Seamus Heaney
We’re a quarter of the way through a new century, and if the past is prologue, 2025 will continue to surprise us in ways that nobody will have predicted. Expect the unexpected, and hold on to hope because hope, my friends, is good for us. Hope can change our lives.
Dr. Shane Lopez, senior scientist at Gallup, defines hope as
the belief that the future will be better than the present, along with the belief that you have the power to make it so.
Hope might feel a little naïve, maybe a little like denial in tumultuous times like these, with wars raging still, impending environmental disasters, and who knows what challenges are really on the horizon as the USA—and the rest of the world—braces for a Trump administration. It might feel delusional to hope, but hope doesn’t mean denying these realities. It’s the way we begin to stand up to them, remembering that we have done it before. Many times. Revolution begins with hope. Without that first glimmer of hope that it would fall, the Berlin Wall would still be standing.
At midnight in New York city, wishes for 2025 from people all over the world will be added to the thousands of bits of confetti that flutter down in the heart of Times Square – a magical sight to behold. It is also a reminder that wishes don’t work. Hope works. And hope is hard work. It takes practice.
Wherever you are today, you might find yourself in an essay from Local Wonders by Ted Kooser, a timely reflection on life and loss and on looking ahead, where the world is waiting for us—in a place called hope:
Life is a long walk forward through the crowded cars of a passenger train, the bright world racing past beyond the windows, people on either side of the aisle, strangers whose stories we never learn, dear friends whose names we long remember and passing acquaintances whose names and faces we take in like a breath and soon breathe away.
There’s a windy, perilous passage between each car and the next, and we steady ourselves and push across the iron couplers clenched beneath our feet. Because we are fearful and unsteady crossing through wind and noise, we more keenly feel the train rock under our legs, feel the steel rails give just a little under the weight, as if the rails were tightly stretched wire and there were nothing but air beneath them.
So many cars, so many passages. For you, there may be the dangerous passage of puberty, the wind hot and wild in your hair, followed by marriage, during which for a while you walk lightly under an infinite blue sky, then the rushing warm air of the birth of your first child. And then so soon, it seems, a door slams shut behind you, and you find yourself out in the cold where you learn that the first of your parents has died.
But the next car is warm and bright, and you take a deep breath and unbutton your coat and wipe your glasses. People on either side, so generous with their friendship, turn up their faces to you, and you warm your hands in theirs. Some of them stand and grip your shoulders in their strong fingers, and you gladly accept their embraces, though you may not know them well. How young you feel in their arms.
And so it goes, car after car, passage to passage. As you make your way forward, the roadbed seems to grow more irregular under the wheels as you walk along. ‘Poor workmanship,’ you think, and to steady yourself, you put your hands on people’s shoulders. So much of the world, colorful as flying leaves, clatters past beyond the windows while you try to be attentive to those you move among, maybe stopping to help someone up from their seat, maybe pausing to tell a stranger about something you saw in one of the cars through which you passed. Was it just yesterday or the day before? Could it have been a week ago, a month ago, perhaps a year?
The locomotive is up ahead somewhere, and you hope to have a minute’s talk with the engineer, just a minute to ask a few questions of him. You’re pretty sure he’ll be wearing a striped cap and have his red bandana around his neck, badges of his authority, and he’ll have his elbow crooked on the sill of the open window. How impassively he will be gazing at the passing world, as if he’s seen it all before. He knows just where the tracks will take us as they narrow and narrow and narrow ahead to the point where they seem to join.
But there are still so many cars ahead, and the next and the next and the next clatter to clatter to clatter. And we close the door against the wind and find a new year, a club car brightly lit, fresh flowers in vases on the tables, green meadows beyond the windows and lots of people who together — stranger, acquaintance and friend — turn toward you and, smiling broadly, lift their glasses.”
I’m ready to step into the club car, heading for a place called hope. There’s plenty of room there.
Winter Solstice is the turning point I look forward to each year. The day after my daughter’s birthday, it is a lovely mid-winter reassurance that the light is coming. Solstice is derived from the Latin, sōlstitium, loosely translated as the apparent standing still of the sun. To ancient civilizations, it looked like the sun stood still at that moment when its rays shine directly over the Tropic of Capricorn, 23 degrees south of the Equator.
The importance of this astronomical event to the ancient Celts is reflected in a massive neolithic tomb in Newgrange, Ireland. In 2021, for the first time, due to COVID restrictions, anyone with internet access could enter the tomb, a place even older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids in Gaza, and observe the phenomenon. A lottery determines who will enter the chamber and experience the phenomenon as it was intended by our Stone Age ancestors, the farmers who created it about 5,200 years ago. In its roof is a little opening aligned to the ascending sun. When that single sunbeam shoots through the roof-box at around 9AM, it illuminates for seventeen minutes the burial chamber below, highlighting the geometric shapes carved in the ancient walls. It is a magic time, long before clocks and calendars and compasses measured time and the distance between us, signifying the turn towards a new year.
Newgrange appeals to sun worshippers and archeologists, ethnographers and tourists, astronomers and poets, and ordinary people like you and me. In the year before the pandemic changed everything, only 16 out of 30,000 applicants from as far away as the United States, were selected to experience the spectacle of solstice at Newgrange.
Unfortunately, Irish weather provides no guarantee of sunlight, and clouds often keep the light out for those waiting for the longest night of the year to end, as was the case this morning for most of the seventeen minutes during which the chamber can be illuminated. With only a few minutes to go, the clouds parted just enough for a sliver of sunlight inside the chamber where only 16 out of 18,500 lottery entrants were granted access.
Magic time.
It is a time when the ancients speak to us, reassuring us that no matter how dark the days, the cycle will always begin again. There’s light on the horizon.
Far from Newgrange, on the sunny shores of Lake Chapala in Mexico, such rituals abound. The legacy of pre-Columbian civilizations can be viewed in a ceremony on the waterfront almost daily. La Danza de los Voladores originated in the Totonacapan region of Veracruz, which in 2009 boasted 38 of the 56 remaining volador poles officially recorded in Mexico. First written about in 1612 by Franciscan chronicler, Fray Jaun de Torquemadam, the ritual is a testimony to the tenacity of indigenous groups in adapting their customs and practices to the new order imposed by the Spanish and also in ensuring they live on from one generation to the next.
A handful of onlookers on the Ajijic malecon pause for a moment to watch, smart phones at the ready to record as the voladores, in traditional costume, begin their solemn procession to a 30m high pole between two trees. One by one, four men climb the pole to reach its summit, where they are closer to the sun god, each of them representing the cardinal points as well as the elements.
All is quiet until a haunting melody begins as the leader, the caporal, hoists himself up to perch atop a tiny wooden platform, the tecomate. Bending, balancing, hopping from one foot to the other, he plays his flute and beats on a tiny drum, turning to face north, south, east, and west, while the pole below him sways precariously in the breeze. No harness. No safety net. Only faith.
Then the moment we have all been waiting for – the flyers hurl themselves into the air. Headfirst, arms outstretched like wings, they allow the thin ropes tying them to the platform to unravel as they spin in ever-widening circles around the pole, streamers the color of the rainbow trailing behind them in the sky. The plaintive tune continues during their majestic descent, each man hoping to make 13 circuits – 52 representing the number of years on the Aztec calendar – imploring the gods to return the sun. Right before reaching the ground, a final flourish – a quick somersault. Legend has it that if they land on their feet, the Mayan gods will be pleased and bless us with longer days.
Mortals again, they land softly to quiet utterances of ‘bravo’ from a small group of spectators who know they just witnessed something sacred, something from another time, for all time. Legend has it that if they land on their feet, the Mayan gods will be pleased and bless us with longer days.
Perhaps it is an act of faith that brings us together to celebrate an ancient light show in a tomb in Ireland or a sky dance above a magical town in Mexico. Together, on sacred ground, we are connected to the past and the future.
Let’s look forward now to brighter days and all good things to come, voladores, arms outstretched.
Some of the best money I ever spent was in 1982. Flush with my university grant, I made three purchases that would change the trajectory of my life – a Eurail pass, a 35mm camera, and a hi-fi stereo system. At the time, I was living in a red-brick terraced house on Ridgeway Street in Belfast along with four nerdy male engineering students who tolerated my girliness but didn’t really “get” me. At the lower end of our street was The Lyric Theater and at the top, The Belfast Wine Company, a well-stocked and convenient off-license. In between, those houses teemed with university students, all of us imaginative misfits, showing up to our classes only when there was nothing else better to do.
There was often something better to do like the evening we spilled out of our houses onto Ridgeway Street, pelting each other with balloons full of water. Looking on, the frontman of Thin Lizzy, a very cool and somewhat bemused Phil Lynott, leaned against the door jamb of a house full of art students from Derry. I have no idea what he was doing there, but he was in no hurry to leave. Because this was in the days before the Internet and smart phones, before Facebook and its steady stream of photos of food and famous people, the only photograph is the image I see as plain as day in my mind’s eye. There he was, a few doors down from mine—a rock star—smoking his cigarette and smiling at us on the kind of Spring evening that transforms Northern Ireland into a Game of Thrones filming location.
Decades later, most of the vinyl records bought with my university grant are stowed away in cardboard boxes in my father’s shed in Castledawson. Some made it to Mexico with me, like Bob Dylan’s Bringing it All Back Home. Faded and stashed between the pages of an old diary is the Eurail pass that took me to places that have stayed in my heart to this day—Berlin, Paris, Florence, Rome, Capri, the Greek islands. The 35mm camera? It was stolen from my first apartment the summer I arrived in the USA. It would be another 30 years before it was replaced when, for my 50th birthday, a year after my breast cancer diagnosis and because he thought I was ready to take stock and see things differently, my late husband gave me a 35mm Nikon.
Back in the saddle, I enrolled with a great friend in a college photography class. I loved it. It required us to pay attention to shapes and patterns and all the lines and curves we had otherwise missed going about our daily business. Like a couple of teenagers, we competed for an “A” from our photography teacher, a badass with a Nikon who was also dealing with breast cancer. Like me, she had neither time nor patience for pink ribbons and platitudes. I loved her. Less technician than artist, she had a penchant for Photoshop’s post-processing capabilities that she knew would made us look more competent than we were. With a dead-pan dead-on sense of what was important, she inspired me to do my homework and to never miss class. Bristling at our predictable photographs shot unacceptably straight-on, she would remind us, with a sigh, that “photography is just light.” It was just light that we just needed to find. Photography, she told me, was “writing with light.”
I wanted to find that light, the thing Amyn Nasser once described as the photographer’s magic:
He has the ability to stir the soul with light and shape and color. To create grand visual moments out of small and simple things, and to infuse big and complicated subjects with unpretentious elegance. He respects classic disciplines, while at the same time insists on being fast, modern, and wild.
Believing in her students the way the best teachers do, she assigned as homework the week of Thanksgiving, a “prepositional scavenger hunt.” She instructed us to shoot from various angles—against, across, beyond, beneath, around, behind, below, between, inside, outside, on top of, toward, through, upon …
So it was that before sunset on Thanksgiving , I found myself wandering the grounds of the Arizona State Capitol, eventually pausing beneath a canopy of shimmering green and pink.
I don’t remember how long I sat there in the shade of those trees, looking skyward and thinking, but I remember it was long enough for prepositions and perspectives to give way to a kind of gratitude, a kind of Thanksgiving that I think has something to do with wherever you find that moment of transcendence— among trees in a desert city or at the break of day on the edge of Mexico’s largest lake.
Thanks is the prayer of relief that help was on the way, that either the cavalry arrived, or that the plates of the earth shifted and that somehow, you got your sense of humor back, or you avoided the car that was right in front of you that you looked about to hit. And so it could be the pettiest, dumbest thing, but it could also be that you get the phone call that the diagnosis was much, much, much better than you had been fearing. And you say the full prayer, and its entirety, is: Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
But for reasons of brevity, I just refer to it as Thanks. It’s amazement and relief that you caught a break, that your family caught a break, that you didn’t have any reason to believe that things were really going to be OK, and then they were and you just can’t help but say thank you.
At the end of the first year of the COVID crisis, Rabbi Bentzy Stolik urged his congregation in Olney, Md, to start each day by getting “on the treadmill of gratitude,” to get in, all in, to the spirit of a season that nudges us to take stock, a toll of all that we should appreciate with optimism for brighter days ahead. The pandemic forced us to reconsider and replace known ways with new routines and rituals; it inspired new reasons—reminders —to be thankful for all we had previously taken for granted. For hugs and handshakes, hanging out and happy hour, multiple trips to the grocery store on the same day and meetings without masks; for hair appointments and pedicures and parties and graduations and weddings and funerals and our kids going off to school every day. We promised ourselves that we’d never take those things for granted again.
Maybe some of us have forgotten some of that, which reminds me of a lovely minute or two from “Waking Ned Devine.”
The hapless Irish Lottery official has just arrived unannounced at Ned Devine’s funeral, right as Jackie O’Shea is beginning the eulogy. Quick on his feet and realizing his scheme to cash in on Ned’s winning lottery ticket is about to come crashing down – Jackie pauses. He looks over at his best friend, Michael O’Sullivan, who is posing as Ned, and as an easy smile spreads across his face, he looks out into the congregation and begins:
As we look back on the life of . . .
Michael O’Sullivan was my great friend. But I don’t ever remember telling him that. The words that are spoken at a funeral are spoken too late for the man who is dead. What a wonderful thing it would be to visit your own funeral. To sit at the front and hear what was said, maybe say a few things yourself. Michael and I grew old together. But at times, when we laughed, we grew young. If he was here now, if he could hear what I say, I’d congratulate him on being a great man, and thank him for being a friend.
To my great friends, thank you. Happy Thanksgiving.
The hapless Irish Lottery official has just arrived unannounced at Ned Devine’s funeral, right as Jackie O’Shea is beginning the eulogy. Quick on his feet and realizing his scheme to cash in on Ned’s winning lottery ticket is about to come crashing down – Jackie pauses. He looks over at his best friend, Michael O’Sullivan, 