Some Blessings to Begin with

It is good, I feel, to begin a new year, or a new day, with a little reservoir of gladness. Here are some gladnesses I have gathered, and two new bird divinations I have made, as a conscious way of consecrating our days with the blessed fact that we weren’t promised any of this — that the universe didn’t owe us mountains and music, that we didn’t have to be born, and yet here we are with our physics and our poems and our ever-breaking, ever broadening hearts.

Wood thrush divination from An Alma...