New Views on an Ending Year

Last weekend, I took a little break and took a bike ride. It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and many of my neighbors were out putting up holiday decorations. While I have seen this many times passing in my car, the perspective of the bike was much enhanced. I was able to hear things that I wouldn’t normally have heard and see details which gave the experience that three-dimensional depth. I could hear a mother calling to her son to bring her the bells she was hanging on the fence and the faint tinkling as he trudged towards her, eyes still on his phone screen. Another person yelling down for something someone to bring them the garlands of lights as they leaned down, hanging onto the rungs of the ladder. And I could hear the quiet hissing of all the inflatable as I drove by one yard that was quite well-stocked with them, their owner circulating and listening for leaks.

This week it rained so even the car ride yielded new vantage points.  The colors of the lights even unlit standing out in the grey light of a rainy day. The overcast skies making the tinsel-strewn snowflakes more life-like. Yards of wet inflatables posed as if in a napping mode beneath the musted colors of garlands and the vivid red of the berries and bows.

In this holiday season in this time, when we still realize that the world being made a new every day, I am going to be inviting myself into new ways of seeing familiar things. That seems a fitting way to greet this particular holiday season that will move the year 2022 into the year 2023.  New perspectives and new ways of seeing seem particularly relevant and offer us a chance to break out of patterns, especially those that we realize are no longer with the energy they may generate within us. For me, this brings the beauties of this season into new focus.