Monthly Round-Up #2

japanese dreams + american schemes

The best part of January is probably the name. January. From the Latin Ianuarius, referring to the Roman god of gates and doorways. January. Sounds like blueberry-infused skin tint, brings to mind snow hiking and vetiver and the actress.

Suffice to say, the month itself seems to shake out less enchantment, more unrest. January is when Pol Pot took power in Cambodia. When the Challenger exploded. When Kobe Bryant and eight other passengers fell out of the sky like some metaphor from the Old-Testament. It seems to be a time that inflicts great pain, with the open-eyed vacancy of a Great Grizzly.

Nothing like a cold knife to the sternum to start another long celestial trip around the Sun.

Maybe December is really to blame, that 30-day moratorium when everyone crawls into the cave and waits for a new beginning. And when it does come, and the light of a new year shines on the freshly fallen snow, maybe we realize that neither the Sun nor the earth’s position nor the fabric of time itself is really and truly new, that we really and truly are not so new either, just the same as we always were. Maybe we feel cheated.

Maybe this causes some deep disappointment. We want something momentous, and so, when it does not come, we make it ourselves.

This is a wonderful thing about human beings: We make our own things. January is also the month in which Galileo discovered four moons orbiting Jupiter. When Captain Robert Falcon Scott reached the South Pole. When Auschwitz was liberated.

It is a strange time, an unsettled time, at least in my home. But perhaps it is not an inherently negative one. No time to despair, really. January is a gate to the remainder of the year and, in this sense, to everything else. It would be naive to expect it to creak ajar, slowly and gently.

No. Let it burst open.

With that in mind…