Happy New Year!
Photograph: Gjon Mili, Bell's, Life Magazine, 1959
On December 31 at midnight, the New Year is welcomed in Japanese Buddhist Temples with 108 bell chimes during the Joya no Kane ritual, which means "bell rings on new year eve's night." The rings represent 108 elements of bonō (煩悩), defilements or passions and desires entrapping us in the cycle of suffering and awakening (saṃsāra). The 108 bell chimes also symbolize the purification from the 108 delusions and sufferings accumulated in the past year.
I came across this blog post yesterday by Peter, a Zen student and spiritual care worker who offers an alternative way to celebrate the New Year by adapting this ritual:
Ingredients: close to midnight, sit in silence for an hour. Then strike a bell 108 times — ideally outside — and with each measured ring remember someone in your life: near and far, dead and alive, friend and foe. Then write on a piece of paper “One thing I want to let go off” and burn it. Then bow and drink a glass of sparkling beverage. Cheers!”
I will find myself spending time with family and friends at the stroke of midnight, but I will try to keep this ritual in mind along with an invitation from the poet, Leonard Cohen that touches on an attitude toward the sacred: “Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.”
The Parabola team is grateful to all of you for reading, and we wish that all your good intentions and highest wishes come to fruition in 2011.
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ARCS
Photograph: László Moholy-Nagy, 7 A.M. (New Year’s Morning), ca. 1930
Yes! and the bedpost was his own. The bed was his own, the room was his own. Best and happiest of all, the Time before him was his own, to make amends in!
“I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!” Scrooge repeated, as he scrambled out of bed. “The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. … A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world!”
—Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol.
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Photograph:Michael Nichols, "a 300-foot titan in California's Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park." From National Geographic.
"A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.
This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security."
—Albert Einstein, Letter of 1950, as quoted in The New York Times (29 March 1972) and The New York Post (28 November 1972).
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Paintingn: Winslow Homer, The Veteran in a New Field, 1865
“The Gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.”
—Homer, The Illiad
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Painting: Alan Lowndes (1921 - 1978) "Cyclist in the Snow"
The all-night convenience store’s empty
and no one is behind the counter.
You open and shut the glass door a few times
causing a bell to go off,
but no one appears. You only came
to but a pack of cigarettes, maybe
a copy of yesterday’s newspaper —
finally you take one and leave
thirty-five cents in its place.
It is freezing, but it is a good thing
to step outside again:
you can feel less alone in the night,
with lights on here and there
between the dark buildings and trees.
Your own among them, somewhere.
There must be thousands of people
in this city who are dying
to welcome you into their small bolted rooms,
to sit you down and tell you
what has happened to their lives.
And the night smells like snow.
Walking home for a moment
you almost believe you could start again.
And an intense love rushes to your heart,
and hope. It’s unendurable, unendurable.
— Franz Wright, God's Silence: Poems
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