what's in your basket tonight?

"loving the wobbles you can't shim"

Plate 72 from Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur (1904), depicting a grove of mosses

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Dear Friend,

Gather the fabric you’ll drape yourself in for this new year, whether rough spun hemp or fluid cotton. Gather the fabric you’ll wear to meet what comes, light or heavy.

What colors do you want to see in the sky? How do you feel when you lay on the Earth? What hungers do you have, for this new year?

In 2025, I want very 5 basic things. I want them to stop. I want an end to: 1) war, 2) killing, 3) construction of weapons, 4) new plastics and 5) extracting Earth’s ancient fossil blood from her veins to make us move faster or burn hotter.

Also, I want the creation of a global kitchen workshop.

In this workshop, we (humanity) collectively decides to work on our issues. We take them one at a time. We decide what’s first by one voice = one vote. We persevere until we decide what’s second. Issues like clean water, literacy, protecting habitat and other species, erasing caste and race hierarchies and ending gendered violence, cooling earth down.

We take breaks to teach each other how to sing, cook, snooze, make babies laugh, and we continue on. The menu is crafted by Chef Mahmoud.

What do you bring in your basket to share at this gathering? You can bring anything you can imagine. You don’t have to have it yet. Just imagine it in.

Whatever you’re bringing in your basket—it’s needed here. You’re needed. Remember.

Step over the threshold into the New Year with all your hope, calm, determination, care and inner peace, and all your chaos, pain, confusion, loss and grief. All the humanness you can weave into one fabric, bring it here. You are needed.

Lift your skirts or your cuffs or bare feet and step over the imaginary line into a New Year. You are welcome. Do your best, and please share what’s in your basket. You’re among friends.

~Abriel

P.S.

Here is a poem for the New Year.

Rain, New Year's Eve

by Maggie Smith

The rain is a broken piano,
playing the same note over and over.

My five-year-old said that.
Already she knows loving the world

means loving the wobbles
you can't shim, the creaks you can't

oil silent—the jerry-rigged parts,
MacGyvered with twine and chewing gum.

Let me love the cold rain's plinking.
Let me love the world the way I love

my young son, not only when
he cups my face in his sticky hands,

but when, roughhousing,
he accidentally splits my lip.

Let me love the world like a mother.
Let me be tender when it lets me down.

Let me listen to the rain's one note
and hear a beginner's song.

by Maggie Smith, published first in Southern Indiana Review, 2017

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