An Epiphany Gift

Don't you love the beginning of the year when everyone is full of gratitude and good intentions? Everyone was out hiking on Fryman Canyon yesterday; families with children who'd never hiked before, dogs that hadn't been outside of their homes, grandfathers with legs that hadn't seen the light of day. And they take photographs by favorite oak tree, whole families smiling together, full of hope for the year to come. Everyone wants to be a better version of themselves; we write thank you letters, catch up with friends on email or text a Happy New Year to people we haven't spoken to in months, we resolve to get thinner, to stop drinking, to stop eating chocolate, to meditate more, to judge less. The trees are stripped of their Christmas finery and our houses are naked, ready to receive blessings. And we are naked too, our arms outstretched, waiting to take on a mantle that is greater than that we've carried before.

It's not surprising that this is the season of epiphany. And I think of the poem by Yeats that inspired Didion:

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

 This is the time of year when we're born again, when we can be what we want, who we want, when we can throw off the misery of previous years.

And so, in the spirit of sharing, over the next few weeks MissWhistle will be posting favorite recipes of good friends (and I am very lucky to have some extremely good cooks as friends). I hope that this will be the start of more collaboration on this blog, of more guest posts, and artists in residence :), in an attempt to live a more elevated, mindful & delicious life in 2013. Happy new year, my friends.