here be dragons (for a new year)

January 1st, 2022

Last night, (well, really very early this morning) I wrote my last haiku. For those of you who are thinking “haiku?,” last year—a year ago today—I embarked on a personal project to help me step into the art form and discipline of poetry, at least a little bit every day, even when I didn’t feel like writing. I wrote one haiku each day for all of 2021, and last night, at 1:30 am Mountain Standard Time, I finished.

It amounted to 113 pages of these bite-sized poems, and to be done feels… unexpected, as almost everything has this year. Somehow, so entrenched in the routine of it, the end snuck upon me silently, permitting me to savor the process up until the very end. A small grace. And without any fuss, the last one was written.

It all feels like a sketch of my year, my heart all scribbled and scratched in an attempt to make something beautiful. Nothing really polished or perfect, not a masterpiece or a symphony. But a collection of sketches on fading paper with bent corners and torn edges, fragments and tunes hummed often in the early morning light or by the glow of the last lamp left on in the house, parts of the ground floor for other poems I’ve written this year and a home for the tempest of words constantly swirling in me. Imperfect and sometimes repetitive and worth every minute of practice and process.

And mostly, as with most endings, it feels bittersweet.

Sweet, because I feel so grateful for the way the project has strengthened my heart and my pen, my companion as I worked through questions of justice and peace, calling and vocation, love and loneliness, obligation and grace. I learned to step into what has become my own sacred practice and know that sometimes something beautiful would happen and sometimes nothing would happen at all. I am learning, still, how to sit with both.

And bitter, because I will deeply miss those quiet times I have come to love–hunched over my journal, counting syllables on my right hand, and closing my journal again knowing that I’d just made something, even if it was just for me.

This morning, as I curled on the couch finishing reading through a new cookbook and looking out at the snow-covered street as I have done so many mornings this year, I reached for my notebook to write my haiku, forgetting it was over. I’m filled up with that particular sadness that comes with “finishing a hat,” in the words of the late composer Stephen Sondheim. The melancholic feeling that rests heavy in your stomach after you’ve made something, after you’ve put something into the world where it was not before. A post-project depression, in a way. I feel it after plays and concerts and recitals and submissions, and I feel it again this morning. It is as if my dear friend has moved away, and I don’t want her to go, even though I know she must.

Empty handed now, the new year has dawned bright and very cold (literally one degree here in Idaho), and I am standing at the beginning of this quiet path with empty hands. Less afraid than I used to be, with less answers and more questions, filled up with a deep love for this great wide spectacular world and wanting with all of my being to work out my place in it. To become whole in it, to accompany others and to allow myself to be accompanied. To trust the processes, and to trust my God who walks with me.

The last year closing behind us was an especially hard one, and truth be told, because of that I don’t have any special plan for this next one. No year-long project or impressive goal to mark the days. But I have a love for you and writing for you, and I will keep doing that, in one way or another. I will keep reading, and keep living, and keep learning, and keep writing about all of it.

*me as Clara in 33 Variations, Wheaton College Arena Theater, 2018*

The last full-length play I was a part of was almost four years ago now, a play by Moises Kaufman called 33 Variations. In it, the character I played, Clara, has a speech that I have never forgotten, that I’ve been thinking about a lot as I look through the door frame of the new year.

She says,

“But like the buildings in this city, we all feel out of place. As my mother would say: HERE BE DRAGONS. English mapmakers in the sixteenth century placed the phrase “here be dragons” at the edges of their known world. They meant to imply that a) well, there were dragons there, and b) that venturing into those regions was a risky proposition.” (Act II, Variation: “Here be Dragons”)

2022 feels like that. A here be dragons sort of year, full of unknown and adventure and learning to be brave. Full of un-expectation.

The journey may have less haikus along the edge of the road and more dragons (here’s hoping for kind dragons!) hiding in the shadows, but all I know is that I’m going to keep walking through it with a backpack full of questions, and I hope you’ll keep walking beside me.

I am so grateful to have this little place in the wide universe of the internet to be with you. It’s been a wild year, a heartbreaking and heart-mending year.

Here’s to making things, to finishing hats, to finding dragons, to loving well, to trusting deeply.

Here’s to a new year.

See you very soon.

alyssa

p.s. The last installment (!!!) of haikus will be posted this coming Friday, January 7th. Keep your eyes out, and subscribe here if you haven’t yet, to receive the last bunch of haikus and any other writing that makes its way to the blog in 2022. I won’t bombard you, I swear— my hope is two emails a month!

haiku//december

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