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.
If you are in a position to donate money to families who have lost everything, follow this link to verified fundraisers.
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.
Although I left Northern Ireland over three decades ago, it is still home, still the place and time from which it is impossible to emerge unscathed. None of us got away scot-free.
With an apprehension I can’t quite explain, I watched Say Nothing, the series based on the best-selling book by New Yorker investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe. Predictably, within the first few moments of the first episode, familiar feelings of revulsion and sadness rose in my throat. It is a harrowing scene that recreates the abduction of Jean McConville from her home in Divis Flats, Belfast, in 1972. A widow and mother of ten, she was one of the Disappeared, people abducted, murdered, and secretly buried during the Troubles. The Troubles—a reductive and casual caption for an era that left in its ongoing wake, so many lost, wounded, and emotionally scarred lives.
It wasn’t until I was far from home and in the middle of my adult life that I realized I was probably a Child of The Troubles even though I was always, by nothing other than luck, in the right place at the right time. It was from a safe distance that I learned to recognize the dull thunder-clap of a bomb, the tremble of our kitchen window in its wake, and the stench of days-old smoke from a pile of rubble that used to be a hotel, a supermarket, a restaurant. The Troubles were almost incidental in my daily life, but the litany of atrocities stayed with me—dates and places, names of victims: The Miami Showband,Bloody Sunday, La Mon Restaurant, Crossmaglen, Kingsmills, Internment, the bombing of Omagh and Enniskillen, Greysteel, Frizzell’s fish shop, Loughinisland.
The list goes on, hearts grows numb …
Physically untouched by this string of horrors, but changed nonetheless, the images are indelible in the storehouse of my memory. Father Daly waving a blood-stained white handkerchief; the blood on Market Street in the heart of Omagh’s little market town; the platform boot on the side of the road near Banbridge; mourners at the Ballymurphy funeral on our little black and white television.
So many ghosts among us.
The Troubles were part and parcel of everyday life. Normalized, but not normal. It was not normal to wait for a boy to check under his car for explosives before he took me to the cinema. A college student who served as a part-time police officer, he was considered a legitimate target. Looking back, I wonder why I would get in a car knowing that it might explode? I don’t know. I know I should have been afraid, and I know I would be afraid if it happened today. My God. What if this happened to my daughter?
Over fifty years later, we have a better idea of the impact of repeated, extensive trauma on children who grew up in Northern Ireland during those years; trauma that manifests as PTSD, depression, anxiety, and phobias. Research completed over a decade ago by the Poverty and Social Exclusion project found that during The Troubles, 10% of adults lost a close relative, 11% of adults lost a close friend, over a third witnessed a bomb explosion, and 3% of adults had witnessed a murder. Three of the 17 people disappeared have never been found. In a country the size of Connecticut, that’s a lot of people and a lot of suffering. Statistics—“human beings with the tears wiped away”—can only hint at the true toll. Compounded by relentless pressures from all sides to say nothing about the terrible things that happened during the Troubles, the trauma often remains raw and unprocessed—for victims, for perpetrators, and for future generations.
Speaking at a panel discussion on the impact of conflict on both civilians and combatants during Creative Brain Week in Dublin in 2023, Dr. Ciaran Mulholland, a consultant psychiatrist with the Northern Health and Social Care Trust, said a 2020 study showed one in 20 young people in Northern Ireland had a stress-related mental health disorder:
If a young person’s family has been impacted by the Troubles, they are more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder or engage in self-harming behaviour
The place and its people are often perceived to have emerged intact from The Troubles, but the impact of that time remains and affects entire communities and generations. To varying degrees, we are all prisoners of the past, and I was reminded of this throughout the nine episodes of Say Nothing. There were moments where I felt not much different than the little girl I used to be, sitting in the back seat of the car not knowing the words for what I was feeling when the soldiers questioned my dad; or, listening to a man on the radio tell us about the massacre of The Miami Showband.
I learned, like everybody else, how to live within the trauma of The Troubles, but I did not learn how to stop the past from invading my present.
For my birthday last year, my boyfriend took me to San Diego for a Peter Frampton concert. A lifetime away from my homeplace, I had last seen Peter Frampton perform at the RDS in Dublin, opening for Chris de Burgh and Janis Ian.
I wore a silver skirt for the occasion, a throwback to the 1980s and long-ago rock and roll summers in Dublin. But these were not the memories that came rushing to me as I waited to buy a T-shirt at the merchandise stall. When a concert-goer complimented my skirt, I found myself immediately transported back to a 1970s afternoon at the Antrim Forum, a new leisure centre that boasted a swimming pool.
I am outside, sitting on the ground, and a policeman is wrapping a silver Mylar blanket around my little shoulders. There had been a bomb scare in the town, and we all had to hurry home. I remember nothing other than being small and shivering, running, still wet from the pool in my blue swimsuit. I remember the shiny, silver Mylar blanket. I remember running home. I don’t remember being particularly afraid. I don’t remember if anyone talked to me about it.
Reflecting on the Say Nothing series along with the likes of Lisa McGee’s Derry Girls, Colin Davidson’s Silent Testimony, Susan McKay’s important commentary, or Kenneth Branagh’s film Belfast dedicated to “the ones who stayed, the ones who left, and all the ones who were lost,” I see an opportunity for those of us who know better to do better.
In the parlance of home, we have an opportunity to catch ourselves on, to catch our own humanity in others. With this mind, I’m wondering if we could go back in time, what would we say to the children we used to be? What would we tell them about security checkpoints and bomb damage sales in Belfast and why we didn’t go to the same schools as the children who went to a different church on Sunday? Would we be able to explain why somebody would time a bomb to detonate in a restaurant where we used to go with our parents for chips? I’m wondering what we would have to say for ourselves?
