Narrated Essay: So This Is The Sound Of You

On welcoming the spiral of a New Year.

Helen Frankenthaler, Skytrail (1995)

To the New Year

With what stillness at last

you appear in the valley

your first sunlight reaching down

to touch the tips of a few

high leaves that do not stir

as though they had not noticed

and did not know you at all

then the voice of a dove calls

from far away in itself

to the hush of the morning

so this is the sound of you

here and now whether or not

anyone hears it this is

where we have come with our age

our knowledge such as it is

and our hopes such as they are

invisible before us

untouched and still possible

- W. S. Merwin, “To the New Year” from Present Company 

What is the sound of a New Year arriving? For some, it may be the willful crack of a firework or the click of the minute hand. The whisper of a beloved in one’s sleeping ear. In W.S. Merwin’s poem “To the New Year," sunrise touches the tips of a few high leaves, and distant birdsong is heard. This quiet renewal, the lightest touch of a blessing, stirs the poet's senses— so this is the sound of you — and beckons us, the reader, to listen more closely. 

In the southernmost part of the Caribbean, on the island of Grenada, there is an overlook I like to visit at dusk: a rugged, unnamed cliff at the top of a grassy hill from which the ocean expands into a circular horizon. 

This is a place one might imagine is hers alone, a place to commune with water, earth, air, and sunlight. Climbing the hill, I find my attention thickening, my pace gradually slowing to the point where someone might come along and find me standing still, un-noticing of their presence. 

Being suspended between worlds is familiar to me. Among my siblings, I was notoriously difficult to pull away from imaginative play or an absorbing book. My children joke “Wake up, Mommy!” when they find me staring into the middle distance. My closest people are accustomed to my non-sequiturs and kindly allow for stone-skipping conversation. 

You see, there’s the front edge of being here — our feet on the ground, present and accounted for. And then there’s the unnamed expanse that speaks through dreams and intuition, the inarticulate, emergent knowing to which we also belong. This is the background into which Merwin listens for the sound of nature’s arrival in a New Year, “here and now whether or not anyone hears it.” These are Robert Frost’s woods, which he refers to only as “lovely, dark, and deep.” 

Shifting the lens from background to foreground, foreground to background, we are not lost, but refreshing our focus. A friend who speaks the language of computer programming offers the technical term for this: context-switching. We are sensing our way between worlds, cultivating an integrative awareness.

To this, Rumi says “The only real rest comes when you’re alone with God. Live in the nowhere that you came from, even though you have an address here.”

The passing of one year into the next can be an integrative threshold, a place of unspooling and re-spooling the thread that we follow. We are among the fortunate ones who have returned to where we began a year ago, and a year before that, and so on around the spiral — newly endowed with the green-tipped growth and thickening ring of four more human seasons.

We’ve arrived here before, but never with these present circumstances, never with this specific configuration of consciousness. What will we do with it? We are moving from a year that has been, laid bare for review, and a year that will be, revealed as yet only through trajectory and imagination.

This time of year the light returns across a slant of shallow sky, so gradually, almost imperceptibly — who would fault us for not noticing? Dr. Seuss said sometimes we never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.

But we do have a choice. We can get quiet enough to listen.

What I wish for you is this: listen at the threshold of this New Year. Avoid the overwhelm of a rap sheet of measurable resolutions, and instead open to whatever within is asking for your benevolent attendance. Soften your vigilance and invite your attention to migrate from foreground to background — which is to say, make room for your inner life, from which a single word or theme might just emerge as your compass. If you journal only once a year, let today be your day. For age and knowledge may be as they are but hope is “still invisible before us, untouched and possible.” May you find yourself arriving on higher ground.