On new year resolutions, intentions and the interconnectedness of it all

2022 was a year of solitude. 2023 will be different.

One morning a few weeks ago, I went to a local diner with my aunt and cousin (her son) for breakfast. I noticed the family as soon as we walked in—a couple with their child at a table a few feet away. The mom was sitting next to her son, who was closest to me, and the father was sitting across from him. Both parents were leaning in, watching the boy color, asking him questions: What color is that? What animal is that? It was a tender scene that I looked over at a few times. 

I’ve been watching families like this for years. I imagine their lives always peaceful and happy, the children are loved and supported, the parents adore one another. I used to be ashamed of this habit, but I realize now that it helped me create a life for myself as I mirrored what I imagined, it helped me become the mother to my daughter that I wished I’d had, even helped me mother myself and attract a partner who loves and supports me with the same dedication and tenderness I imagined those random couples did. 

The waitress (whom I’d later learn is named Amy) served the family their breakfast and turned to take our order. She had just walked away when I heard the crash. The dad jumped up so fast, his chair went flying, just missing the person sitting behind him. The dad was at his son’s side, his back to me, his body covered the scene. At first I thought the boy was choking. Dad cradled the boy and brought him down to the floor slowly. That’s when I saw the boy’s body jerking. He was having a seizure. The dad spoke softly: I’m here, Jorgy. I’m not letting you go. I’m right here.

His mom stood over them. Jorgy, baby. Jorgy. Her voice was a low whine, soft and desperate. Her hands shook as she cried and tried to dial on her cell. 

Everyone watched frozen. In horror? Helplessness? 

I grabbed my phone and dialed 911. Stood up, said to the woman, I got it. It’s ok. Her eyes were far away, and I knew she hadn’t registered what I’d said.

I know that feeling…

I put myself in her field of vision, met her eyes, and motioned with my phone.

She nodded, lowered her phone & continued her heartbreaking whine: Jorgy, baby. Jorgy. Mama’s here, Jorgy.  

The 911 operator asked questions that I relayed to the parents:

Boy or girl? Boy 

How old is he? Four.

Is this his first seizure? He had his first seizure last night. 

Is he breathing? Yes.  

The ambulance was there minutes later.

By then the operator had me monitoring Jorgy’s breathing, counting the rise and fall of his chest.

I got up and out of the way, and proceeded to move chairs and tables so the paramedics could do their thing unobstructed. A woman who’d been there the entire time and was standing next to me at this point said: You’re so calm.

That’s when it hit me. 

This memory came flying in, silent and sudden when I saw this meme circulating on social media last week. 

No one will ever know the violence it took to become this gentle.

You have to understand, for much of my youth and becoming years, I was the opposite of calm. My nervous system was a mess, always on high alert, ready, I sensed danger everywhere. I didn’t trust anyone, any situation. What I’m saying is I didn’t trust myself. And when things went wild around me, I struck out or I fled. Mostly I struck out with my fists.

I’ve been writing letters to this girl I was…

Dear Peleona,

You have been fighting for your life since you were in your mother’s body. 

You fought the birth control pills she took to prevent you.

Ma was four months pregnant when she found out she was pregnant with you. According to the story, when she told dad, he chased her into the street and tried to beat you out of her. You held on. 

When her body tried to reject you all those times she had to rush to the hospital because she was bleeding clots the size of fists. You held on. 

When you came into this world screaming, it was a whole different fight. 

47 year old Vanessa is so different. I feel grounded and sure in ways I never have. This fist now holds a pen. 

I don’t know if Jorgy is okay. The last I saw him, he was being taken away by the ambulance. By then he was more alert, though the saliva was still dripping from his partly opened mouth and his head still lulled to the side a bit. But he’d stop seizing. I hope the doctors find what’s wrong and are able to heal him.

That day I saw my healing in real time. I saw the work I’ve been doing on my heart and spirit, in action. I’ve said this before: you don’t know how much you’ve healed until you see and feel yourself behave differently in situations that in the past would have sent you reeling, swinging or running. 

No one will ever know the violence it took to become this gentle.

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Studies done on mothers have found cells from their children in their brains from pregnancy. This means that on a cellular level, a child is a cellular extension of their mother. 

If you know about my strained relationship with my mother, how I left her home at 13 to save my own life and have been unmothered since, you know I’ve been chewing this information in my maw since reading it. 

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I turned 47 on December 9th. I spent it offline, under the trees and the big sky, like I wanted. My phone on silent, I was in my favorite place, the forest, in my body, laughing and talking and staring at the soaring hawk in silence with a dear sister friend who drove 1.5 hours that morning to go to brunch with me and allow me my each and every whim—which really just meant driving us to nearby trails to let my inner child frolic outdoors, the one place that’s always brought me joy and a sense of wonder. We sat on a rock for a while and found what looked to my imagination like an oasis in a field below us, where I envisioned fairies lazing around and being mischievous. Of course I squealed and had to go see for myself. When we found bear scat by the walls of the atoll, I imagined a bear’s den hidden beneath the tall grass that sprouted from the center. The image made me pause, shake my head at myself, and keep climbing. 

As we exited the trail, we came upon two hiking sticks some generous souls left for whomever needed them. 

This has been a theme for me over the final weeks of this year— interconnectedness & generosity. How much we need one another. 

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A few weeks ago I was writing in my office when I heard a ruckus outside my window. I was shocked to see hundreds of starlings with their glossy hued backs of purple and blue.

In her poem “Starlings in Winter,” Mary Oliver describes them as:

Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers.

Loud and boisterous, starlings as far as the eye can see pecked at the ground & chirped from the trees. I’ve seen videos of murmurations but this is the first I’ve ever witnessed one with my own eyes. No video does the experience justice. I ran to our deck to capture the scene. (I can’t share the video here because substack still hasn’t rolled out their video feature, but you can view it here.)

Scientists don’t know why starlings do this. There are theories, of course, but no definitive reason, which fascinates me. 

Research on the spiritual meaning of murmurations reveals: “Starlings are symbolic of communication, of your relationship with your fellow members, and your standing in society. They also symbolize unity; often seen flocking together, these birds have learned that we are always stronger together than alone.” (Source) 

There goes that theme again…

There are no Native American mythologies about the starling since they are native to Europe and Asia and didn’t arrive to this side of the world until the late 1800s. 

In Ancient Rome, religious leaders read their flocking forms like air borne tea leaves, interpreting the shapes of the murmurations to decipher the will of the gods. 

I learned that Mozart had a pet starling of which he was very fond. Allegedly, it could sing parts of his compositions and may even have inspired Mozart’s work. When the starling died, Mozart staged an elaborate funeral for the bird and composed an elegy in its honor.

In the US, starlings usually stir mixed feelings. They’re persecuted as aggressive and unwelcome invaders, but they continue to thrive despite the odds.

Which of course made me think of Peleona and my stubborn will to survive and thrive despite having to fight for my life since I was in my mother’s body. 

And it also made me think of something I’m finally doing to advocate for myself and my daughter. I’m not ready to share publicly but let me just say that single moms (of which I was one for ten years) are the real MVPs and I don’t care who says otherwise. 

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In the days building up to my birthday, my curiosity led me to Facebook’s “On This Day” feature. I used to be much more active on social media so I wondered about how I documented getting older. I noticed a trend: Every year I write about what an hijueputa of a year that year has been. Over and over, I wrote about how hard that year was. I mentioned some of the good, but energetically I felt the pull of the tough shit I’d experienced, heartbreaks and disappointments, and a lot of self-sabotage. 

Here’s the thing: it’s not that this isn’t true, it’s that my view on things has shifted, or maybe middle age and entering my late 40s got me all soft and waxing poetic. 

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2022 was a year of solitude. Yes, I know I’m married and solitude sounds like the opposite of being partnered, but my electrical forewoman (aka boss lady) wife works full time in the city, and so most days, I’m home alone for hours. My car was on the fritz for months and I live in the country now where a car is required to get places and do things, so I was home often. I spent a lot of time alone in my garden this spring and summer, and spent a lot of time writing and reading (so much poetry) and being in and with nature. 

I think of Mary Oliver’s Poem “Long Afternoon at the Edge of Little Sister Pond,” where Oliver describes life as: 

hard as flint,
and soft as a spring pond,
both of these
and over and over.

Ross Gay writes in the intro to his anthology Inciting Joy:

But what happens if joy is not separate from pain? What if joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with one a mother? Or even more to the point, what if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things? What if joy, instead of refuge or relief from heartbreak, is what effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreak? Which is to say, what if joy needs sorrow, or what Zadie Smith in her essay “Joy” calls “the intolerable,” for its existence?

Damn…

My heart goes to a flash piece I wrote for Jane Ratcliffe’s newsletter Beyond, in answer to the question: What book(s) do you treasure this time of year?

When I think of the holidays of the past, I think of a photo my mother sent me years ago of us in the mid-1980s on Noche Buena (Xmas eve). The 6 foot plastic tree in the background is heavily decorated like my second mom Millie did every year, so much sparkly garland and tinsel, bright lights and shiny ornaments, you can barely see any of the needles. I can still hear the gold ornament that emitted a loud male cardinal chirp. Millie buried it deep in the crevices of the tree, & we kids took turns searching for it. The first person to find it got a prize & bragging rights. In the pic, my older brother Juan Carlos is mid-dance move, his arms are bent, one over his head, his lips are slightly pursed like he’s feeling the rhythm. I’m in front of him, dancing too, my arms up, hair in barrettes away from my face, I’m looking at him in a way that shows he’s already my hero.

As adults he loved dragging me around the city, to 5th Ave and Madison, boutiques and galleries along the cobblestoned streets of Soho that neither of us could afford. He planned family outings to Macy’s Santaland and the tree in Rockefeller Center. Carlos loved this time of year, so it’s been a sad time for me since he died in 2013, and became even more dreadful when his only child Justin Andrew was murdered in mid-December last year.

Justin was my first child—when my brother got locked up my first year of college when Justin was just one, I took my brother’s place, picking my nephew up weekends to take him to museums and parks. I can still see him running down the hall of the 9th floor of Columbia University’s John Jay Hall, his giggles ricocheting off the walls.

I have a clear memory of reading Clement Clarke Moore’s Twas the Night Before Christmas to him that year, sitting on the floor of my dorm room, Justin sitting snug on my lap, the book in front of us. He pointed at the pictures with his pudgy finger, then looked up at me, as if to say: “What’s that, titi?” I responded: that’s a star, that’s a tree, that’s Santa Claus.

The other day at Walmart my Titi Sulma spotted a beautifully crafted Twas the Night Before Christmas. I remember her reading it to us as kids, then to her children and ours, and now her grandson. It’s her who’s kept the traditions alive, a matriarch, she is the keeper of these traditions and rituals that I worry will go with the older generation when they depart.

“Grab it,” she said excitedly when I told her the book was on sale for $5. The memory of Justin and I in my tiny dorm room in John Jay Hall flashed across my mind, and for the first time in a long time I wasn’t sad when I remembered him, my first child. I remembered my brother and holidays of long ago, and I remembered that picture.

“I’m gonna read it on Christmas Eve,” she said with a big smile.

I blinked hard and said: “Make sure you wait for me before you do.”

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I set writing intentions every year and have been doing this for years (that’s why I created the Master Manifesting: Writing Intentions for 2023 Class which I facilitated on the 29th), but I’m taking this ritual further this year…

This year I am setting an intention inspired by all these signs around me and what I’ve learned about mycelium and trees and how interconnected we really are: 2023 will be a year of community, of me reaching out to folks I love, spending time with them, committing to being in community with writers in ways I haven’t been since the pandemic (more on that soon as my writing and teaching is taking me around the country in 2023).

I had a deep loss at the end of last year that I don’t know I’ll ever recover from–the murder of my nephew, my brother’s only child. In many ways Justin was my first child so losing him so violently is one of those deep griefs that will walk with me forever. It’s why I initially dug into solitude at the beginning of the year. I had to  grieve alone like I did when my brother, my Superman, died…

My brother Juan Carlos & Justin Andrew

Then a nasty confrontation with my mother, where she was characteristically cruel and disrespectful, led us to stop speaking. It’s been six months now. The last time I saw her, she looked at me in the same way she looked at me when I was kid—curled-lip hatred that used to make me want to burrow into myself and die. But I’m a grown woman now who can say no, don’t treat me like that. As you can imagine, that didn’t go over well. But this grown woman knows I deserve gentle, supportive love. And this grown woman knows my mother is incapable (or unwilling?) of giving me that… More grief. 

My daughter turned 18 and moved to college. Empty nest syndrome buckled me.  I’ve been questioning who I am outside of motherhood while also acknowledging just how fiercely I broke the unmothered cycle. This had stirred so much emotion, some grief but mostly great pride and happiness. 

And so, in 2023, I commit to remembering what Oliver teaches: there are times hard as flint and times that are soft like a spring pond. Over and over. 

And when the day are hard, I will remember that time I was in my garden this past summer; I was crying and talking to my wife about my ache for my mother when a hawk alighted onto a branch just a few feet from me and stared. I was overcome with such incredible awe at this hawk and how nature stays giving me unmistakable signs like these. 

I felt that same joy when I saw my flower bed start to flower, and when the green and yellow bush beans began to grow. 

When I picked the huge yellow squash blossoms and took them to my titi, who taught me how to fill them with cheese, batter them and fry them up, a delicious delicacy I plan on making for years to come.

When the flint digs in, I will pull close the memory of my loud giggle and how my cheeks ached from smiling when I harvested the mini potatoes and fat carrots that I ate raw because they were so sweet. 

I will remember the wild corner of milkweed that the monarch caterpillars feasted on. Sometimes I found a dozen at a time munching away at the leaves while the monarch butterflies feasted on the nectar of the small pink flowers. 

I will close my eyes to reimagine the hummingbirds that visited every day a few times a day, and the coyotes that howled back at me on the full moon; the racoons who despite being so cute with their small baby hands, turned out to be mischievous bandits who made a mess on my deck, turning over flower pots and spreading the soil everywhere when I stopped putting out the bird suet they came hunting for. 

I will remember the frog orgy in the pond that started this year days before the vernal equinox, and the time we got a visit from an Eastern Screech Owl, and how for weeks this summer, every night at twilight, a Barred Owl and a Great Horned Owl started hooting in the canopy behind the house, rhythmically, like they were in tune with each other, one started and the other followed, and they went on like that for a while. I’d go out every night to listen, and called my wife and daughter over excitedly, though they’re rarely as thrilled about these things as I am. It was this orchestra that made me go investigating so now I know how to differentiate the two owls by their hoots. (Random fact I also learned: despite what we’ve been made to believe, only these two species actually hoot.)

Let me tell you, there’s nothing like lying in bed in the middle of the night, curtains drawn, and hearing the hoot of an owl on the spruce not ten feet outside your window. The hoot echoes in your chest, so you lie there listening, letting the ricochet envelop you. When it stops, you know the owl has moved on, it’s wings so stealth, you don’t hear it flap away. 

What am I really talking about here? I’m talking about “the hum” that Shonda Rhimes refers to in her TED Talk: My Year of Saying Yes to Everything. 

“I work a lot. Too much — much too much. And I love it,” she says. “When I am hard at work, when I am deep in it, there is no other feeling.”

She has a name for this: the hum. “The hum sounds like an open road and I could drive it forever,” she says. “The hum is a drug, the hum is music, the hum is God’s whisper right in my ear.“

But it’s a trap. The more successful she becomes, she says, “the more balls in the air, the more eyes on me, the more history stares, the more expectations there are … the more I work to be successful, the more I need to work.”

Until Rhimes found herself wondering: “Am I anything besides the hum?” Her hum was broken; all she heard was silence.

Enter one of her daughters, who one day asked Rhimes to play as she was walking out the door, she stopped and said ‘yes.’ “There was nothing special about it. We play. We are joined by her sisters. There is a lot of laughing, and dancing and singing. I give a dramatic reading from Everybody Poops. Nothing out of the ordinary, and yet it is extraordinary.” She felt focused, still — good. “Something in me loosens and a door in my brain swings open,” she says. “A hum creeps back.”

She realized something: “The work hum,” she says, “is just a replacement.” She had to face the hardest of facts about herself: that she, in some ways, liked being at work more than being at home. That she was more comfortable working than playing. But that only in playing did she find that hum again.

“The real hum is joy,” she says. “The real hum is love.”

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Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estés, author of the tome Women Who Run with the Wolves writes:

[Resolutions] are not 'last minute-improve yourself-last hope for whatever.' They are thoughtful Winter crops, planted now, and cared for and harvested later. I name them: the Spirit Field of your Being.

"Resolutions" are the ancient rituals turned to and implemented throughout winter, signaled by Winter Solstice which says, start now, prepare now, think things through now...in order to plant anew NOW, and to harvest as time moves through winter. 

New Year's Resolutions begin to be seeded at Winter Solstice: New Year's Resolutions are the Spirit Field created and cared for during the dark days of winter, to come more and more into blossom as we move toward Spring.

Remember that. It bears repeating if one needs to axe their way through the overculture's nonsense about the scrap of 'new year' offered to most by most. 

Your Spirit Field is planted now. In order to come to blossom and fruit more and more through the next 16 to 20 weeks from now. New Year's Resolutions time has ancient roots… For this time too, is the time for sorting the good seeds from the bad seeds, to plant the best in the Spring... the time that too will be signaled by tides of moon and weather, the return of Light and Warmth... and because we prepared in Winter, we will be ready when Springtime comes again to bring better, best and best of best to life again…

What is "resolution"... it means to 'loosen.' To let loose... to consciously choose to replace, renew a something, with something fresh and/or more useful, better. To make concrete. Like stone pillars to hold the Light as it streams through a dark window  during this time. Like stones with serious intentions writ on the bottom that are laid on the earth, to pin those ideas to the earth for the sake of creatures, earth, air, sky, human beings. 

Many have said the meanings of Stone Henge, Wood Henge and Medicine Wheel have been lost, that no one really knows what it all meant.

I know. I remember. So do you.

And so I resolve in 2023 to ask myself these questions more..

Where is your HUM? 

What feeds your HUM? 

What, who, where is the root of your HUM? 

And I am going there… I am sniffing out the hum and I am following it where it leads. 

Y tú? What’s your hum? And how can you have more of it in 2023?