What Takes a Year and a Day

Back at the beginning of the year 2000, I was studying with a women's spirituality group and had, in the course of that study, all sorts of projects handed to me to complete, all manner of things to examine. In that first month of the new millennium--everything so strange, no one accustomed yet to dating their checks with this odd new century--the assignment came through to undertake a pilgrimage, following that same worn path taken by so many spiritual seekers through so many spiritual traditions. I remember the day I got that assignment: it was a bright, cold, January afternoon, and I was shivering in the room where I wrote in those years, a room with stone floors and windows on two sides. I looked out one of them at the sun reflecting off the snow; I looked at the thermometer, which hadn't gotten out of the teens for a week. I decided that it was too damned cold to even think about taking off anywhere, and for that reason, thought to myself that maybe I could make my own pilgrimage an interior one.

And, I knew exactly how to go about doing it, because I'd just read a little newspaper story about a man who had recently done the same thing. I'm not sure where the idea to spend a year writing a poem every single day originated from; maybe it was with Emily Dickinson, who I understand did the same thing one year (and in fact, enjoyed it so much that she followed up that year with a second one just like it). I wasn't at all sure that undertaking such a project would exactly equate to a physical pilgrimage like the one described to us--after all, in the Canterbury Tales there is no scribe who stayed at home and called her story in. But I was pretty sure that spending such a year would likely leave me with some things to think about.

And so I began, and liked it so well--not as well as my friend Emily, for it took me four years to try it again--but liked it so well I did go through it again, the second time around also on the Leap Year, and by now it's beginning to feel like a tidy little habit, and so today once more, set off on the poem-a-day journey. The first time through much changed: that year, my mother died from cancer, and then my husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer (the writing year ended not too long after his initial surgery). In the second year, we were a few months into his recurrence when the cycle started up again, and by the time that year was finished there were still several months left before he finally died from his disease. What I found was that I could in fact continue writing in the face of pretty much anything; what I also found is that so far, I've been unable to adequately write about what the experience is really like. I'm hoping this third time will be the charm for that, though. We'll know how that turns out in about another year.


Last night I had two dreams: in the first, it was a winter holiday, likely Christmas but maybe New Year's, too. I was in my living room with my brother-in-law and his wife, and they handed me the last remaining box there was to open. In it, there was a magnificent robe: it was hand-knitted, and hooded and long, and was designed of fantastic rows of color and pattern running around it in horizontal bars. There were dark orange, and black, and brilliant turquoise as the primary colors; and everything else in the background, yellows and greens and other shades of blue in dizzying, joyful patterns of diamonds, checks, waves, almost too much to take in visually, let alone describe. I said to them, how did you know I wanted this? It was perfect. It came to me that I hadn't known myself it was what I wanted, or at least had not been able to articulate that.

I might have forgotten this dream except that I woke then, with the idea in the back of my mind that there was something important that I needed to do, and gradually it came to me that today was the start of my third time along this path, the third time I'm writing my poem a day. In that early hour--I'd woken nearly an hour before the alarm would have gone off--I began to panic a little bit: what on Earth was I going to write about? And then that more peaceful, higher octave of myself said that's easy, write about your dream. At which point I remembered it, and also remembered this one that I had either when I was waking up or when I was drifting back off to sleep again: I had made a set of squares out of some sort of clear, resinous material. They were about three inches across, and there were four of them in the set. The idea was, you tilted them around a bit and inside of them--they were slightly domed on top--black and white images began to bloom, sometimes a little abstract, sometimes more representational. And then you arranged the four pieces together to form a sort of vignette, or snapshot, or fractured image, and the thing was called: Becoming You. You could pick them back up and tilt them around again, and other images, other little stories would appear, and you could play this game for hours.

I stayed in bed for quite some time while I memorized both of these dreams, and then I wrote for a little while in my head, the first three lines anyway of what will become the first poem in this year's journey. I am writing about the multi-colored robe, because I understand intuitively that it's something that was meant for this journey (and I also understand how it rhymes with the dark red cloak I was given by the entrance to the cave in my birthday dream). As I'm writing this I'm still thinking about how I'm going to write about that, and worrying a little bit about when I'll find the time today.

But so far, I do have my opening stanza, and I remember that the very first time I did this exercise, it played out exactly the same way: I woke early, and in the cold light of morning started to write and got part of the way through my poem before I was interrupted by the needs of the day; I remember too that the ending suddenly came to me as I sat in the car pool lane at my son's elementary school, getting ready to drop him off at kindergarten. It's nice to think that the rest of this particular poem may come like that, suddenly and unbidden (although in one sense, I'm bidding for it like crazy here). But, it was a nice way to begin the day, two dreams, a stretch of incubatory darkness, what feels like a magical gift of a magical robe. After I'd memorized the dreams and written my lines and memorized them, too, I got up to start the day. On the way downstairs I stopped on the landing and peered through the blinds as I sometimes do. Outside, the sky was blooming in mottled tones of black and white and gray, just like the resin squares in my dream, chrysanthemums, fogscapes. Behind it the waning moon, invisible at just that moment, was backlighting the whole thing and my imagination arranged the pieces of the vignette this way and that, while I tried to determine how to interpret them. And then I let the blinds fall closed again, and, my head stocked with what feels like provisions for the entire year ahead, descended the rest of the stairs while the world and I both moved toward morning.