New Year’s Eve
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: December 31, 2007
At midnight tonight, the horses on this farm will age a year. That is the custom — every horse has the same birthday, Jan. 1. Like all things calendrical, this is a human convention. When it comes to equine conventions, I know enough to notice some of the simpler forms of precedence: who goes first through a gate, who gets to the grain feeder ahead of the others. But I can report that the horses make no fuss about their common birthday or the coming of the new year. Tonight, like any other, they will be standing, dozing on their feet, ears tipping back and forth at the slightest of sounds.
There is something deeply gratifying about joining the horses in their pasture a few minutes before the clock strikes 12 on New Year’s Eve. What makes the night exceptional, in their eyes and mine, is my presence among them, not the lapsing of an old year.
It’s worth standing out in the snow just to savor the anticlimax of midnight, just to acknowledge that out of the tens of millions of species on this planet, only one bothers to celebrate not the passing of time, but the way it has chosen to mark the passing of time. I remember the resolutions I made when I was younger. I find myself thinking that one way to describe nature is a realm where resolutions have no meaning.
It’s not that time isn’t passing or that the night doesn’t show it. The stars are wheeling around Polaris, and the sugar maples that frame the pasture are laying down another cellular increment in their annual rings. The geese stir in the poultry yard. A hemlock sheds its snow. No two nights are ever the same.
I always wonder what it would be like to belong to a species — just for a while — that isn’t so busy indexing its life, that lives wholly within the single long strand of its being. I will never have even an idea of what that’s like.
I know because when I stand among the horses tonight, I will feel a change once midnight has come. Some need will have vanished, and I will walk back to the house — lights burning, smoke coming from the wood stove — as if something had been accomplished, some episode closed.
VERLYN KLINKENBORG
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: December 31, 2007
At midnight tonight, the horses on this farm will age a year. That is the custom — every horse has the same birthday, Jan. 1. Like all things calendrical, this is a human convention. When it comes to equine conventions, I know enough to notice some of the simpler forms of precedence: who goes first through a gate, who gets to the grain feeder ahead of the others. But I can report that the horses make no fuss about their common birthday or the coming of the new year. Tonight, like any other, they will be standing, dozing on their feet, ears tipping back and forth at the slightest of sounds.
There is something deeply gratifying about joining the horses in their pasture a few minutes before the clock strikes 12 on New Year’s Eve. What makes the night exceptional, in their eyes and mine, is my presence among them, not the lapsing of an old year.
It’s worth standing out in the snow just to savor the anticlimax of midnight, just to acknowledge that out of the tens of millions of species on this planet, only one bothers to celebrate not the passing of time, but the way it has chosen to mark the passing of time. I remember the resolutions I made when I was younger. I find myself thinking that one way to describe nature is a realm where resolutions have no meaning.
It’s not that time isn’t passing or that the night doesn’t show it. The stars are wheeling around Polaris, and the sugar maples that frame the pasture are laying down another cellular increment in their annual rings. The geese stir in the poultry yard. A hemlock sheds its snow. No two nights are ever the same.
I always wonder what it would be like to belong to a species — just for a while — that isn’t so busy indexing its life, that lives wholly within the single long strand of its being. I will never have even an idea of what that’s like.
I know because when I stand among the horses tonight, I will feel a change once midnight has come. Some need will have vanished, and I will walk back to the house — lights burning, smoke coming from the wood stove — as if something had been accomplished, some episode closed.
VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Happy New Year To All! May you not only be blessed, but wise enough to appreciate your blessings!
7 comments:
PS: We started this New Year's Eve without electricity for the past two hours.
Beautiful, Joan!
Happy New Year to everyone!
ps: What's up with the electricity, New?
not sure... they have been replacing power lines in the area, but that usually has the power out for 10 minutes at a time. Someone else said there was an accident on 121.
It's nice to take stock on New Year's Eve of all the blessings we've had that past year. Other than that, I'm not a big New Year's Eve reveler.
Although I sent the NY Times piece around to several family and friends, my first thought when I read it was of Nora. Those of us who have been around horses even for a short time understand their presence - and no one personifies that image more than Nora.
Happy New Year to all --
Note: Verlyn's farm is actually in the Albany area I believe.
Hope your new year was good mine was great
i'm going to be getting a blog it's cowlover7121996 cause i messed up on other one
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