Japanese: Oshōgatsu is the festival of year’s end and of a new beginning.  The holiday is celebrated by gathering with family and friends to eat traditional foods. The feasting is typically preceded by the visit to a local temple where at the stroke of midnight one offers a coin to the deity.  The temple visit has a marked non-sectarian texture and everyone is welcome.  After tossing the coin one bows in concert with everyone present for a moment of devotion to request good fortune for the twelve months to come.  Indeed are we all not at the mercy of fate, the timing of good and bad fortune? 

As contrast to the American notion of radical individuality, by the practice of Oshōgatsu ritual one has the palpable sense that one belongs to an entire people, sharing a single spirit.

What will 2024 bring for me personally, and for the wider expanse of our species?  I cannot hazard a guess because the future by definition is undetermined.  The future is a composite of the fixed trajectories of Nature, and of human nature.  I’d rather not use a term which is so inscribed with negative, toxic connotations inherited from Christianity.  For my purpose here “human nature” is a handy metaphor highlighting the will to survive at the heart of our species.  We join together as nations, or in piety bowing before our God, and by rationalizing our role vis-a-vis others — as the means at hand to survive.

I think that warfare will be a feature of the new year.  Will we in the West conjure sufficient strength to support the survival of Ukraine?  When enough have died on one side or the other, the murder and destruction will be concluded by a temporary agreement.  All agreements are “for the time being.”

I think mass immigration from the southern hemispheres will continue, accelerating, due to a warming climate.  Label the migration legal or illegal, all impediments legal and physical will bend and break on account of the crush of humanity.

I think the slave-revolt in the United States will not subside until it is repressed by a greater force.  That is if the old status quo manages to sustain itself.  What is Trumpism but a slave-revolt?  Does the old guard have enough perspective, enough will-to-power to act to crush treason in the only way such actions can be finished?

And what about the one who writes?  I think growing older is certain.  I’ll manage a rear-guard resistance, the intentional orderly retreat so that I can keep reading and writing and living.  

What about the photos?  The colorful image is of marbles filling a glass drinking goblet.  Symmetrical, colorful shapes are bisected by AK-47 and 9mm ammunition.  Another image is of a frost framed rose of sharon seed pod.  Spring is coming!