One of my more delightful projects, since leaving full-time work, has been facilitating some discussion series for the Maine Humanities Council at our local public library.  The second of those, just completed, was on the contemporary detective novel as social novel — we read Laurie King, Tony Hillerman, Eliot Pattison, and Katherine V. Forrest.  In each of these, there’s the age-old tension between the-way-things-have-always-been and the forces of modernity; scholars of postcolonial theory will recognize all the makings of hybridity, of a world that is many things, combined, and that therefore is more complex and less easily boxed up than we might like.  Hillerman says it best, in “Dance Hall of the Dead,” when a character mentions the motto over the entryway of an Indian reservation school: “Tradition is the enemy of progress.”  Under these auspices, kids were pulled from their families, beaten for speaking their native languages, and turned from their cultural heritage.

What the heck does this have to do with New Year’s?  I’ve been thinking about the innate violence of resolutions, the way many of us feel encouraged now to excise the warts of our being and stitch up the wounds ourselves.  Lose weight (you fat slob); lay off the booze (though you’ll be dead boring if you do); stop cursing (what the #*&^! for?); get a damn job (unless you’re actually as worthless as you seem).  It’s a tough time of year anyway, and when you add in all that stock-taking and all those toggle-switch models of change (flip UP for good behavior, DOWN for bad), well, it gets plain painful.  I am, however, a big fan of the “intention” — a gentler, kinder version of a resolution that seems to start from the premise of oneself as a decent, rational, perhaps even lovable being, with a desire to commit to certain shifts.  Intentions seem to make room for human foibles; they seem less apt to end up as “successes” or “failures.”  Perhaps this is because of the kinds of traditions they stem from — Buddhist, yogic, mindful, generous.  These are traditions that accept us unconditionally, that insist, in fact, upon us being always and only who we are, warts and all.   In my book, these kinds of traditions are the only possibility for progress, largely because they don’t make room for the concept of “enemy.”  There’s you, there’s me, there’s the world, and we’re all just trying to get along without mauling ourselves or each other too badly.  I intend, then, to be kinder and more accepting of myself and others; I intend to honor the old as well as the new, in others and in myself.  I intend to seek transformation and positive change in myself and others (like, for example, potty-training); I intend to love us all as hard as is humanly possible in the process.

Ezra, in the throes of recovery from several simultaneous dread diseases, ate something close to an actual dinner tonight. This led to a significant increase in chattiness at bedtime. In the dark, as he’s supposed to be falling asleep snuggled next to me, he offers in an enthusiastic whisper: “Mama? Red-eyed tree frogs have red toes. And they’re sticky so they can climb every something they want to climb. And they can jump every jump they want to jump.” As Kingsolver once said: “It is senseless to love anything this much.”

Here’s the thing about love: it shows up in more ways than you thought were possible.  It’s in the color of your kid’s hair and eyes; the tiny muscles of his chest; the sweet rancid smell of his morning breath; the blurred speed of his words as he tells a very important story very fast; the giggle as his baby brother pats his back for the first time.  It’s in his hearty rendering of ABC’s (both “his” version and Alpha-Pig’s version) in the back seat of the car; his intense concentration on linking up his wooden train set; his fierce insistence that the LYING DOWN tiger sticker is more important than the WALKING AROUND tiger sticker.  The stone-amber of his eyes; the quick intelligence of his mind; the unselfconsciousness of his dancing.

When he was a baby, Ezra had a tendency to touch, with one hand, a mole on my chest while he nursed.  Little did I know that that habit meant my cleavage would become his “lovey,” his touchstone, his ultimate source of comfort.  For days, now, during his illnesses, he’s been ritually grabbing for my chest, despite the fact that he hasn’t nursed in eighteen months.  And tonight, as we lay reading “The Library Lion,” he said, “Hey, Mama?  Is it okay if I take a break now?  I need to use this finger to count the children.”  In the library in the book, he meant.  I have new hope for tomorrow.

We travel to New Hampshire at most Christmases when we don’t have a brand-new baby (or the threat of one), to see my dad and stepmother.  They live in a beautiful house they designed and built, completely off-grid, on a mountaintop in the Monadnock region.  It is, I always say, a wonderful house from which to be in the world.  That sounds like an oxymoron, but it’s not: the house is full of windows, as its primary energy sources are active and passive solar, and out every window is a vista of striking beauty.  Just being here is restorative, but also inspiring, and the back-and-forth between the two sensations is little short of a miracle.

I’ve been thinking about inspiration a lot, lately, in all of its forms, and about miracles.  It’s hard to think of one, I suppose, without the other.  I mean the Thich Nhat Hahn version of miracles rather than the standard Christian varieties (the miracle, he says, is not to walk on the water; the miracle, he says, is to walk on the earth).  But at Christmas time, I am reminded that much of humanity heralds as a miracle the birth of an infant around this time, and his astonishing gifts of kindness, courage, generosity, and clear sight.  Having two small boys of my own is miraculous enough to me — their small hands (Chi’s fingers, I decided yesterday, measure nearly an inch now, from tip to dimple) — but that they occasionally also exhibit these larger gifts is staggering.  It gives me, in a phrase, hope for humanity.

Barbara Kingsolver’s character Codi in the unparalleled Animal Dreams struggles with hope, having learned early that loss hurts (here we remember The Princess Bride: “Life IS pain, highness.  Anyone who says otherwise is selling something).  But Codi has a sister, Hallie, who lives inside her hope: “What I want is so basic I’m almost embarrassed to say it.  Elementary kindness.  Enough to eat, enough to go around.  That kids might grow up one day to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed.”  I’m paraphrasing, since I left the novel at home, but I’ve read enough times to be fairly sure I’m close.  Hallie says, “The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for.  The very most you can do is live inside that hope.” It’s easier to live in what’s already around you, to try to welcome that or at least not fight it tooth and nail, and to try to make small differences where possible.  But this, I know, demands a shift in what Kingsolver dubs “ground orientation.”  As Codi says, “I’d spent a long time circling above the clouds, looking for signs of life.  Hallie was down there living it.”  Perhaps the hope, then, is not necessarily the abstract kind that sets lofty goals and five-year plans.  Or perhaps it might be, depending on the person.  For me, the hope seems smaller, more local, at least these days.

And as I write that, I realize that I’m fulfilling the prophecy of Loyd in that novel, whose brief disquisition on what animals dream about constructs the title of the novel.  “I think animals dream about whatever they do in real life…it’s the same with people…your life, what you do and all that, it’s not separate from your dreams, it grows up out of them.  So if you want sweet dreams, you’ve got to live a sweet life.”  (This section is horribly bastardized, a hybrid misquote from a longer conversation.  But you get the idea.)  So as my life has shrunk, and yet expanded in a L’Engle-esque miracle, my dreams have shrunk.  Perhaps I should say, focused. And I’m eager to see the bigger work return to center stage, because I still believe in the macro-levels of  hope that are realized from there.  And yet, at Christmas, it’s easy to be reminded as all mothers are, that in each child lie the seeds of transformation, of hope, for us and for the world.  It’s possible — I might even say it’s likely — that we are, each of us, the gift of hope, the possibility of honesty and beauty and love.