In the Stillness of a New Year Dawning

 I am an early riser.

It is quiet, it is serene, it is beautiful, it is hopeful to begin a new day while the rest of my house sleeps, most especially when everyone is on holiday and no one has to bustle anywhere. It is even sweeter when it is a weekday, when the calls of schedules and meetings, classes and assignments, bottom lines and budget projects, are not what takes up all the waking energy.

So I sit and absorb the stillness.

Contemplate and wonder about what will unfold.

Today, it is the Kwanzaa Principle of Kuumba, Creativity, that hopeful optimism of ones art being welcomed into the world just for the sake of its beauty, to celebrate a beautiful people who this year saw products beyond the IG and Etsy shops but in Target's Black Makerspace, in HBCU t-shirts being sold at mall department stores, at Black becoming mainstream. It is beautiful to behold, after the year,  years we've had with protest for our Black American humanity and the pandemic that hit Black and Brown communities the hardest, to see roses emerging from concrete.

I gazed out over the tapestry that was 2021 and wondered about it all. The Nap Ministry reminding me and others that just because we are good at something doesn't mean we need to grind it to death, to commodify our bodies, that just existing is beloved and worthy enough.  I followed crafters on IG who made me want to pull out color pens for my planners when in the end the writer in me just made lists for my day, not enhanced with my former scrapbooking days, but the possibility was there. I gazed back and smiled at all we overcame.

In these wanning hours of the last day of a year that began with so much and is ending in so much, I wanted to just pause, not so much with an agenda for this last day except trying to decide if we are doing my traditional Haitian Soup Joumou or African American black eyed peas and rise. I just want to be.

The morning gives me that quiet, to sip a latte made on my new espresso maker with the shot pulled just right, to sit amongst the company of writers whose books I eagerly purchased for my growing TBR pile, to listen to the movement of the house where I am sheltered, safe, and serene. 

Whatever unfolds in this day, in the beginnings of hope for a new year, I wish we will just be human.