Said across my table / my town / my mind to yours:
Here is to 2021—to newness, to hope, to love. To all the ways we thought we would be crushed and weren’t. To all we have endured and all that is to come because of that. Here’s to changing and also not. Here’s to gratitude and the way it turns what you have into enough. Here’s to feeling, to reveling, to loving, to fearing a little, and loving again.
Thank you for quiet and the way you can fill it with glimpses of the sublime (your roommate making rice, your neighbor walking his dog, your sister laughing). Thank you for all that lays ahead and thank you for all that lays behind. Thank you for this path and the holiness I am learning to see. Thank you, Universe (?) (whoever/ whatever you believe in), for taking care of me so incredibly well that here I am: alive and healthy and writing.
Here’s to more health, to more walks and more tea and more chocolate. Here’s to remembering that you have so many people who will answer their phone if you call it. Here’s to all the incredible people that make up restaurants, hospitals, schools. To the bus drivers, to the bookstores, to the coffee shops and the sidewalks. To sanitation, to masks, to kind words. Here’s to people who let you go first in line, and here’s to being that person more often.
Here’s to difficult conversations and how they pave the way to more than you imagined. To checking your privilege, to teaching your elders and your children about systemic racism. To reading more than one article and one book about feminism, BLM, and the patriarchy. Here’s to intersectionality and all it has to teach us. Here’s to learning, always.
Here’s to all that’s inside of you now and all that will be there in twelve more months. Here’s to knowing that you can, knowing that you must. To believing, to hoping, to trusting. Here’s to January and February and March, to summer, to autumn, to the first snow. Here’s to the whole year that lays ahead of us, arms open.
From my glass to yours—clink, clink—cheers!