end of the year feasting.

Every year, at the very end of the year, I put before my eyes a feast for my heart. Words and reflections that I now commend to you.

1. An end of the year reflection on the song "American Tune" by Andy Whitman of Paste Magazine:

We cross the oceans and send rockets hurtling to the moon, planting our flag on whatever scrap of rock we can find, claiming the land and its allegiance as our own. But it’s not. We’re misfits and strangers here, always voyaging, never able to escape from ourselves or the inevitability of our demise. And there are days when it appears we’ve learned nothing, least of all how to love. Just turn on the news. Or take a look at my heart. I think of the words I’ve spattered this year like bullets, fired willy-nilly out of anger, arrogance, stupidity, even naiveté, always amazed that the gun goes off when I pull the trigger, always slightly stunned when that scent in the air turns out to be gunpowder and not the sweet perfume of the scattered roses in my mind. It’s the shock of recognition, the one clear moment that comes only when all the distractions and entertainment have faded, when there are no more excuses, when the mirror reflects our true image. What can you do? In my case, you pray. And you play the single greatest song of a singularly great American songwriter. You shut up and you listen. Some nights that’s the best thing you can do.

2. A return to the songs "Sons & Daughters" by The Decemberists and [insert shameful plug, here] a reflection I wrote for the Concord a couple of winters ago on the song.

3. This poem by Robert Frost, usually during the hustle and bustle of final papers.

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening
by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

4. This NPR recording of Annie Dillard in honor and memory of the Tsunami in December of 2004 (I strongly urge you to listen to the recording). Here is the transcript:

On April 30, 1991--on that one day--138,000 people drowned in Bangladesh. At dinner that night I brought up the catastrophe. My daughter was then seven years old. I said it was hard to imagine 138,000 people drowning.

"No, it's easy," my daughter said. "Lots and lots of dots in blue water."

She was too young then to understand the supreme importance of each individual. Those tsunami victims in Bangladesh years ago and these tsunami victims now on the shores of the Indian Ocean were not dots, sweetheart, they were beloved daughters like you, beloved sons. They were partners in love and fathers and mothers; every adult knows this.

It has been a stunning time for us adults these past six decades since the war. Nothing is new, but it's all as fresh for every new crop of people as this year's winter-killed grass. What is eternally fresh is our grief, what is eternally fresh is our astonishment, what is eternally fresh is our question, "What the Sam Hill is going on here?" And incidentally, is anyone running the show? Does such omnipotence mete out moral justice by hurling hurricanes here or there or pointing tornadoes or terrorists at towns. I think we could not find anyone to make a credible case for such a proposition.

After all, even we mere people hold the individual precious, or does an individual's significance weaken with distance like the force of gravity? Well, would I exchange two Sumatran lives to save my daughter's life? Lord, I probably would. We eat at restaurants while innocent people starve in Haiti. They starve in Haiti and the Sudan too and we reach deep for as much as we can possibly spare and double that to haul humans out of the whirlpool while there is hope.

A newspaper headline said, "Head Spinning Numbers Cause Minds to go Slack." But, surely we agree our minds must not go slack, neither must our hands. We the living now enter the surf to form a human boom like a log boom. We try to encircle and enclose and bring in and burn or save the dots, all the dots: those Indian and Indonesian dots, those dots dropping everywhere in Iraq right now, the starving dots. We do not go slack, we secure the boom, we hold tight to other hands in the water, we save and rescue as many dots as we can whether we can see the people flail in front of us or not.