As I write in front of the fire, today is the last day of 2021, and I have made something that I want to share with you.
To mark moments, I tend to make things. I pluck out angsty break-up songs on my ukulele and write poems when the world gets too heavy. I knit scarves with one row for every day of the year (looking at you, 2022) and scribble a few lines in my 5-year journal each night. I like to remember. I like to celebrate. I like to look back on who I was and the things I made with my hands and my imagination.
My favorite thing that I do is create my end-of-the-year video. This is third year in a row that I’ve shamelessly recorded myself reading aloud a poem that I shamelessly wrote, set it to music and video clips taken throughout the year, and tossed it onto the Internet to see what will happen. What usually happens is that several people in my life will watch it once and think, “Wow, that’s lovely,” and I watch it 800 times. It gives me hope to see my life set to music and poetry. It reminds me that there is more to the year than the way I might be feeling at the end of it, weary and dismal as a barren December tree.
This rambly piece that I’ve written is another quick attempt to mark the year, to respond to the call of Wendell Berry when he writes “We live the given life, and not the planned.” Very little about this year was planned, and what was planned took on a life of its own and threw away my expectations, ripped them off like one of those tear-away suits. 2021 was a strange beast of a year, and I hunted it through the transitions and life changes and highways I drove down. Both dreams and nightmares came true.. In the middle of it, I felt anxious, unmoored, loneliness that I haven’t felt in a long time. Looking back on it through the lens of what I’ve made, I feel more settled and secure. I survived the heartbreaks, the uncertainty, the frustration. Through this video, I see the celebration, the hope, and the promise for more of the same in the future, as I fly back to Texas and start many things anew.
You do not have to make something to mark the year, but I hope today you mark it in your own way, with friends, with family, with chosen family, or just with yourself, with a raised glass of something sweet, to yourself in the mirror, to mark not just that this year happened, but that you were a part of it. You were here. I was here. And what we did here, no matter where or how small it was, mattered.
As you read this wherever you are, today is the first day of 2022, and I want to share my newborn hope for this newborn year with you.
You can watch my 2021 wrap up on the “Videos” page, or here.