Sailing onward into a New Year

A New Year’s boat, ready for launch. — Erich Ferdinand/Flickr

It’s been another tough year in the Age of Covid and the way ahead is anything but clear. I long to feel that shift, that lift in the wind that might carry us forward toward smoother waters and broader horizons.

Everyone has their own way of ringing in the New Year, with hats and horns or raised champagne flutes – or perhaps tucked in bed, waiting for the crystal ball to drop.

My celebration is all about sending negativity down the river and mustering the courage to greet the new year with enthusiasm or at least some small hopes. Somehow, that seems more important than ever.

I first came across the idea many years ago at Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth), a spiritual sanctuary and sculpture garden in Warwick, NY, just over the border from Waywayanda State Park. This charming New Year’s ceremony is derived from Buddhist customs with perhaps a nod to Tibetan and Thai cultures.

The Festival of the Boats, as I came to think of it, involves burdening a little vessel with slips of paper on which you have written the woes and cares of the year past. You take it to streamside, set it afire and send it downstream, enjoying the cathartic effect of ridding yourself of all your troubles.

Well, this appealed to me enormously — I couldn’t get it out of my mind. In due course, when I moved to a property that bordered a creek, I launched my own boat festival, on or about New Year’s, to carry on the tradition. In my version, we make little boats from brightly colored paper — origami boats — sneaking the Japanese into the cultural mix.

My guests have demonstrated unsuspected artistic talents in the decoration of their vessels. From the piles of catalogs, magazines, stickers and glitter pens I provide, they man the boats with cut-out crews, create flower-laden canopies, bend sails and pennants to their masts, apply stars and logos to their hulls.

Some years, it takes a flotilla… — jen/Flickr

I have been amazed — at the dexterity of their fingers, the tenacity of their work, the stretch of their imaginations. And this from people of whom you would say "No way they’d get snookered into a wacky arts-and-crafts play date." Trust me, this is the only party I have thrown to which people have regularly invited themselves.

I have witnessed the bowed heads and busy pens of those scriveners, documenting their sorrows, gauging how many slips of paper it will take to cover the important points, eyeing the capacity of their boats to carry the several or many disappointments of their lives. I have enjoyed the sight of my friends — grown-ups, most of them — gently guiding their boats downstream with long twigs, freeing them from snares on the bank and urging them on until they burn to the waterline.

If making, decorating and launching the boats is pure play, there are always moments of lip-biting seriousness as we all confront what has caused us pain in the year just past. How to phrase it? How to get it down in just a word or two? What do we note and what do we dismiss?

I had an urge to add a coda that would address the future so I provide everyone with a smooth stone or two to toss upstream — along with a wish for things yet to come. That inspiration came from Annie Dillard, one of my favorite writers in a genre I call rhapsodic natural history. In "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," her Pulitzer Prize-winning volume of 1985, these words of hers spoke to me:

"I look up the creek and here it comes, the future, being borne aloft as on a winding succession of laden trays. You may wake and look from the window and breathe the real air, and say, with satisfaction or with longing, ‘This is it.’

But if you look up the creek, if you look up the creek in any weather, your spirit fills, and you are saying, with an exulting rise of the lungs, ‘Here it comes!’... It is the live water and light that bears from undisclosed sources the freshest news, renewed and renewing, world without end."

Amen.