Marking Time
Köda at Sunset (c) 2016, Kaia Fowler
Demarcation. The act of noting a boundary, a limit. A dividing line. Midnight tonight ends 2020 — wherever you are, which is literally at different moments in time for my friends in New York and my friends here in Wisconsin and my friends in Denver and Seattle. Perhaps this fact alone, that the New Year starts at so many different times, gives away how arbitrary this changing of the years truly is. What marks the change for you? What serves to divide the segments of your journey through this life?
For me, I find these dark December days recalling to me what has gone: the childhood of my now adult sons, my own young adulthood, road trips taken, campsites not seen for years now, ghostly memories of once vivid adventures, and, most of all, people and pets who no longer walk physically with me in this world.
My beloved dog Köda, pictured above, joined our family in 2012 as my husband Scott’s dog and, to Köda's great sorrow, outlived his favorite person in the whole world by a few years after Scott’s death in July 2013. Köda and I companioned one another in our shared bereavement. We understood one another in the silence of long nature walks and consoled each other in the warm sorrow of embrace. Dogs give good hugs. I miss Köda and I miss Scott, of course. The vessel of winter slowly fills with missing for me . . . . and with longing.
Longing starts with enthusiasm for new creative pursuits for the coming year, as the preeminence of light gradually returns. I went through my over-stuffed, worn out songwriting folder yesterday, sifting through starts and stops and crossed-out lines—I like to decipher the crossed-out lines to see if I agree with my Self who crossed them out—and I sorted the unfinished songs into folders. Completed songs remained in the well-loved current folder, an object that has come to represent refuge and playground for me as the act of songwriting does. Some in-progress songs were selected for continued nurturing and placed into a new songwriting folder. Other incomplete songs were quietly interred within a folder labeled “unfinished,” where they will likely remain indefinitely—perhaps until I die or decide to clean out my writings to spare someone else the work when I am gone.
So it has risen to the surface, the awareness of my own death as we collectively agree to turn the page to a new calendar year. It comes not as a morbid fear of death. With all I have seen, I welcome a humble respect for the undeniable reality of limited time left and the sense of purpose it gives me. This awareness spurs me to renew my interest in the precious present, here now, gone the next moment.
At a time in society when death shouts from the headlines, already 344,399 dead in the U.S. from COVID-19 as we say goodbye to 2020, I mourn constantly. I mourn and I send love and comfort into the space between us, the places where our lives and spirits touch, where we come together as one. I actively pour the energy of hope and solace into the dark ache of tragic loss flooding our shared experiences of living now. I pause to remember the ones taken before their time this year by virus or violence and I offer to witness and minister. Through song and deed, I infuse the darkness with the light that has been given to me to share and feel grateful for the healing I feel as keenly as the wounding.
Creating saves me every time: music, words, like lifelines on a stormy sea. Have you fallen overboard like me? Let’s make our way back to ship, back to shore, again, each time we fall, let’s come back to a place of safety and warmth together. Like Köda and I got each other through the deepest days of grief, we can all companion one another through the darkness and into a better today. That way, we can all rest in turn and share the burdens and the joys of living.
However you mark time on this life-journey, I offer you hope for this day and the next and all the ones to follow. May you have a Happy New Year!
~ Kaia