[encore] 1032: Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me by Jane Hirshfield
Jan 1, 2025
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Reflect on the past year and discover the power of community in overcoming challenges. The speaker shares poignant insights while celebrating the importance of attention and joy. As the new year dawns, find inspiration in the continuity of joy amidst life's ups and downs. Embrace nature and personal rituals to uncover beauty and hope in everyday moments. This reflection encourages listeners to welcome change with resilience and positivity.
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Quick takeaways
The podcast explores the contrast between personal achievements and global turmoil, emphasizing the complexity of human experience amidst adversity.
It advocates for a collective approach to life's uncertainties, highlighting the importance of community over individual self-sufficiency in coping with challenges.
Deep dives
Reflections on a Milestone Year
The year 2023 marked significant personal achievements, including the receipt of the Academy of American Poets Fellowship and the publication of a new book, highlighting a year filled with milestones. These accomplishments, however, coexist with a backdrop of global turmoil, such as ongoing violence and technological upheaval that prompt ethical discussions. The contrast between personal joy and external chaos illustrates a feeling of powerlessness in the face of unimaginable events, including record-breaking heat and unrest. The speaker reflects on the duality of experiencing success while grappling with collective societal challenges, emphasizing the complexity of human experience in a turbulent world.
A Shift in New Year's Resolutions
Rather than adhering to traditional resolutions that emphasize individual self-improvement, there is an appeal to embrace community and shared challenges as a counter to feelings of anxiety and helplessness. The notion that self-sufficiency is a myth is emphasized, advocating for a collective approach to facing life's uncertainties. A poem by Jane Hirshfield is highlighted, suggesting that our contributions to the world's challenges may lie in our capacity for attention and joy, despite the prevailing hardships. This perspective encourages individuals to acknowledge their abilities and resources while actively engaging with life's complexities, promoting a sense of connectedness over isolation.
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Reflections on a Year Passed and the Call of Community
Today’s poem is Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me by Jane Hirshfield.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. We’re taking a break this week, so we’re sharing some of our favorite episodes from the archive. We’ll be back with new episodes on January 6, 2025. This episode was originally released on January 1, 2024.
In this episode, Major writes… “The clocks have struck another year. Soon, I will box up and archive 2023 in the mental basement of my mind, although I'm sure certain events of the past 365 days will reverberate in both predictable and not-so-predictable ways into the future. Today’s poem makes a powerful assertion that maybe what we bring to the problems of the world, to our sense of survival, is our attention—and our joy.”
Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp
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