2024: The Year of Catching Light

Photo by Darren Richardson on Unsplash

I started the new year by tearing off my clothes on a frozen beach, hopping from one foot to the other in cold, silty sand.

I yanked off more and more clothing till there I stood: black bikini, sandals abandoned, eyeing the smooth water of the Chesapeake Bay. Not far down the beach a number of bundled-up citizens walked their dogs and poked at shells and otherwise behaved in a normal, January manner. Not me, I was down to my skivvies.

Lest you think I’m insane, my friend Christen was there too, also in a bikini. We’d arranged a cold plunge as the way we wanted to enter the new year. To me, cold-plunging isn’t really a show of courage or superhuman strength. It isn’t for the health benefits (though I believe in them) and it isn’t for bragging rights. To me, a cold-plunge is a little bit of a baptism: you go in old, dip down and breathe deeply till your body regulates against the shock, then emerge new and full of polar light.

“Ready?” I shook the sand out of my t-shirt and laid it flat, then prepped the blanket that would warm me after.

“Okay, let’s go!”

We waited for a gap in the fellow beachgoers, then jogged into the placid bay, sending droplets of slate-colored water scattering. In the bay you have to go much farther out than you do in the ocean (the site of my first ever cold-plunge) but what you trade by wading far out you win back by getting to submerge at your own pace; no bone-chilling waves tumbling you over before you’re ready. We pushed a little deeper out then sank to our knees and bobbed like corks, up to our chins in the frigid water. It was clear out there, and beneath the serene water I could see dark nests of seaweed, little pebbles, and petite white oyster shells.

If you have never cold-plunged before, the point is mainly to continue breathing, to remember to exhale instead of taking a series of shuddering gasps.

In with a long, ragged breath, out. Your body knows this. You can still breathe, your body is just surprised. In and out. Blood fizzing hotly through your veins to comfort you against the cold. In and out.

It’s funny how breathing through the systemic shock of ice cold water feels not unlike breathing through an onslaught of painful emotions. You are okay, your body knows this, you can still breathe. Similar, also, is the sense of cleansing when you’re finished (though I would one thousand times rather lie down in a January bay than cry).

Christen and I were in and out in one minute and seven seconds - a short plunge, but enough. I felt nothing but wide awake, my residual sleepiness gone, my body not so much cold as aching with life. The water dripped down my arms and winter-white legs and energy surged upward like carbonation through every cell in my body. Alive, alive, alive.

We wrapped up in towels and blankets and peeled our clothes back on over wet swimsuits. The others on the beach tried not to stare. Crazy girls, you’ll freeze to death.

---

This year, I hope to live in the richness of where I’m planted. I have individual goals and intentions but they all center around this: that I don’t pass by this present tenderness. Oh, there are things I hope for of course…and it will be a year in a world that is still imperfect. But I’m taking clippings of the beauty and planting them in gardens. I am cultivating the current spaces as if they’re the only spaces I have. Because really they are; the only spaces I have, I mean.

I still long to be a mother, of course I do. But for once that is not the primary focus of my wishes for this year. I feel that I spent a lot of time holding space for sadness about this in 2023, and that was good but it was also costly. This year I want to continue with more focus and more joy. I know how to carry the yes/and of infertility better than ever, and I feel I have room to begin to celebrate the not-yet-ness of my adult, married life. The fact that parenting eludes us means that Andrew and I - a child-free couple - have time to establish our relationship, operate with spontaneity, save money, and focus on personal growth, all of which are things that at one time or another I also prayed for. I look forward to the flourishing that will come from settling into this.

And there are other places too, a lot of other places, where the principle applies. In my health, my creative life, my relationships, and my home, I am turning up the furrows to find hidden delight. What does it look like to act like this is it: the one act, the whole shebang, the beautiful coming-together of things? What does it look like to believe - really believe - that I am living the days I am meant to be living, exactly at the pace I’m meant to be living them?

Finding the answers is my responsibility for 2024. I am eager to fill my days with noticing, appreciating, and enjoying. With contentment, really, but not a contentment born of stale assent. A contentment born of knowing this is my life, it’s not ahead of me about to happen; it’s here.

---

Among those who consider themselves birders, I’ve learned about a tradition called the “first bird.” This tradition says that on the first day of a new year you go outside and the first bird you clamp eyes on will have symbolism for the year ahead of you. Of course I don’t formally adhere to symbolism. Something about it feels fabricated to me, like getting your facts from Wikipedia: someone noticed owls sound melancholy and now they represent sadness, and when you see one, that means grief is going to storm your life like the Normandy beaches. Beware! No thanks. Nevertheless, I am a meaning-making human who can’t help but find the idea a little interesting. I decided to look for a first bird too.

As I awoke yesterday, the first morning of 2024, I heard the rusty sounds of our resident crow family calling back and forth to each other. Sometimes they sit on our chimney and caw down it, driving our cat insane. Today they called to each other from the roofs of the townhouses across the alley.

“Don’t let it be a crow,” I winced, keeping my eyes averted from the window. I like crows, I think they’re smart and interesting, I’d like to befriend one and teach it to speak, but a crow isn’t what I want to hover over my year with their traditional associations of trickery and death.

Then I thought of my cold-plunge plans and likewise hoped the First Bird wouldn’t be a seagull. What do seagulls stand for? I don’t really know, but I imagine that since they’re no especially beloved bird, their cunning and deception would rank high as potential symbolic qualities. I thought it had better not be an LBJ either (a “little brown job” as the plethora of nondescript small, brown birds that twitter across the world are known). I’m no good at identifying those and a house sparrow’s symbolism couldn’t be especially nice, could it? Something about those quarrelsome birds puts me in mind of domestic disputes and overdue payments.

But I needn’t have worried. On my way to pick up Christen a really good bird darted across the highway just in front of my car: a northern cardinal, bright red and jaunty as a wink. I didn’t even need to perform a Google search to know that this was a good sign. Cardinals signify joy, passion, hope, comforting visits from beloved, deceased relatives, and nearly every other good thing you can imagine.

“Oh, thank you!” (to the bird and to God and everybody.)

I’m not at all superstitious, but this year I’m wide open to the wealth of an ordinary life. I think God can send miracles like a blazing scarlet cardinal for your First Bird - and I think noticing them is how you sink into a rich life. A bird can be just a bird, or it can be a benediction. A dip into the bay can be a stupid idea or it can be a taking-off the old year and a slipping selkie-like into the new. It’s all in how you turn it so it catches the light.

I’m catching the light in 2024. I hope to share it with you. It’s a year of settling in to the mystery and the magic. It’s a year of making room for the wonderful, not wondering if I’ll ever break into the rooms I feel locked out of.

And if it all sounds a little corny, the cold-plunge, the First Bird, the wishes for the year ahead of us…well my gosh what isn’t a little corny about the New Year anyway? I love the mutual corniness of an entire neighborhood outside for a walk in the wan sunlight of January 1st, hell-bent on “exercising more this year” or “a thousand hours outside” or “knowing the neighbors’ names.” Rangy and pale as the too-early narcissus bulbs sprouting in my beds, we humans amble through the streets and wish each other a happy new year, though it’s hardly our custom to say anything but a tepid “hi” under our breath in passing. I love the shared impulse to start fresh, and the shared fantasy of believing we will do it, and the way that just once (even just for one day) the world seems slightly reborn. We’re all little more ginger, like softshell crabs that have discarded their tougher carapaces in an effort to bring forth new growth and expansion.

I’m here for the corny. I’m here for dinner parties that are more dinner than party, and workouts that are more fun than intensity. I’m here for less small talk and more knowing each other. I’m here for continuing to forget where my phone is, and getting rid of my watch tan because I don’t wear one anymore. I’m here for hoping and praying for future things, but worrying less about if and when they’ll happen. I’m here for resting like it’s my job, and working my job from a place of rest. I’m here for serving my community and giving more than I consume, for planting literal gardens and tending metaphorical ones. I want to plant a climbing rose and a lemon tree, and help tend a pollinator garden for no one but the butterflies and honeybees and an occasional songbird. I’m here for buying much less, and making do with what I have, for listening to my body and blessing, not cursing. I’m here for spending time in nature, cherishing the natural world and doing my part to be a better steward of the earth. In short, I’m cocked and primed for a good year.

I can’t help it.

It’s the hope-r in me.

Here’s to a fresh year, loves, as unrumpled as crisp sheets and a well-fluffed duvet. May 2024 be exactly how and what we need in order to grow gently upward.

Love,

Rachel