Stepping over the threshold into 2023, gives us the opportunity to look back over the year we’ve left behind, another year layered over a lifetime of layers.

The gorgeous poem, “The Layers,” by Stanley Kunitz says it well.

As the poet looks back at his “feast of losses” and at “the manic dust of my friends, / those who fell along the way,” he wonders how his heart can ever be reconciled. Yet rather than being overwhelmed, he speaks of his determination to move forward:

“Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.”

These are days when I can feel that change is in the air; I haven’t yet been able to discern what those changes are, or what my life will look like in the year to come. But I receive and share with you these words of hope and conviction from the end of the poem:

“Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.”

May we courageously embrace whatever changes this new year will bring into our lives!