One little word….

New year, time for a new word.  As for my year spent with Memory, I feel like it was a pleasant companion and I am glad for our time spent together in earnest.

My word for this year is Silence.  Today, as I have done for two years prior, I once again moved from one year’s list of hopes to another the dream of making a silent retreat at either a monastery close to home or a hermitage at a convent a bit further.  I think the monastery is calling to me and I am not sure why I haven’t made that happen.  But it is the silence that calls.  Not silence so much as in the absence of sound.  At the monastery there are the lovely prayers of the hours and the sounds that a  place of silence makes.  I think the silence I crave is more of a barrier between me and sounds that distract me.  And those might not be so much sounds as my own lack of inner quiet.  I want to make friends with some sense of emptiness, where words or music or even thoughts come at my invitation.  So, silence.  Welcome 2013.  This poem is  a nice welcome into silence.

New Year Resolve

by May Sarton

The time has come
To stop allowing the clutter
To clutter my mind
Like dirty snow,
Shove it off and find
Clear time, clear water.
Time for a change,
Let silence in like a cat
Who has sat at my door
Neither wild nor strange
Hoping for food from my store
And shivering on the mat.
Let silence in.
She will rarely speak or mew,
She will sleep on my bed
And all I have ever been
Either false or true
Will live again in my head.
For it is now or not
As old age silts the stream,
To shove away the clutter,
To untie every knot,
To take the time to dream,
To come back to still water.