As a way of closing out this year and welcoming in the next, I offer you a poem – of hope and possibility, of the beauty inside us and around us, and of the immense possibility we each have on this journey we call life.
I invite you to read it quietly, read it out loud and share it with someone for whom it will have great meaning, thereby touching the magic of this season of hope and celebration.
With great gratitude, we wish you a merry Christmas, happy holidays and all the best for 2011.
MAMEEN
Be infinitesimal under that sky, a creature
even the sailing hawk misses, a wraith
among the rocks where the mist parts slowly.
Recall the way mere mortals are overwhelmed
by circumstance, how great reputations
dissolve with infirmity and how you,
in particular, live a hairsbreadth from losing
everyone you hold dear.
Then, look back down the path as if seeing
your past and then south over the hazy blue
coast as if present to a wide future,
recall the way you are all possibilities
you can see and how you live best
as an appreciator of horizons
whether you reach them or not,
admit that once you have got up
from your chair and opened the door,
once you have walked out into the clean air
toward that edge and taken the path up high
beyond the ordinary you have become
the privileged and the pilgrim
the one who will tell the story
and the one, coming back
from the mountain,
who helped to make it.
– David Whyte
from RIVER FLOW: New & Selected Poems 1984-2007
Copyright 2006 Many Rivers Press
