How do you measure a year?
Jonathan Larson in Rent was pretty specific:
525,600 minutes.
And also extremely poetic:
“In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee.
In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife.”
And for me, I measure the year by the anniversary of Belle going to her heavenly reward last January 20th.
Of my many crackpot beliefs and practices, one of the most helpful has been Human Design.
(Basically astrology + I Ching + some yoga + some channeled nonsense.)
In Human Design, when the sun enters the 41st Gate of the I Ching, the New Year Begins.
In 2022, that’s exactly as I write this on Saturday, January 22nd.
Thus, congratulations may be in order.
You may have just been given the best possible gift:
The opportunity for a fresh start.
If you want, you can start the new year again today…in this very minute, with your very next breath.
In fact, forget about January 1st.
It turns out you can pretty much pick when the New Year begins.
For example, Chinese New Year is coming up on Tuesday, February 1st.
2022 also happens to be the Year of the Tiger, an animal I’ve often felt deeply connected to and written about before HERE.
And if you want yet another fresh start, there’s always Rosh Hashanah, which is Sept 25-27th this year.
Note: Rosh Hashanah marks the beginning of the Judaic civil year and––fun, quirky detail––the traditional anniversary of the creation of Adam and Eve.
In other words, it’s the official anniversary of the Beginning of all Beginnings.
I think of Belle all the time.
Her ruffled red collar is framed on my desk in a shadow box.
In fact, as though I were a hedge fund manager on Billions, except for my laptop and a lamp, that’s all I’ll allow to disrupt the clean surface and my panoramic cityscape view.
I love having a colorful, tactile reminder of her ever-present.
And yet…
Many years ago I ghostwrote a memoir for an affluent duck hunter in the deep south.
He owned a vast reserve where billionaires and penniless good-old-boys and judges and senators and even Bill Clinton when he was Arkansas’ governor came to hunt.
As much as I liked my subject, this was definitely NOT my world.
Going through hundreds of his hunting photos and memorabilia was akin to a trip to a distant galaxy.
Our only area of intersection though––and what definitely landed me the gig––was that he also loved his Lab.
Actually, make that plural.
Labs.
It was perhaps less of a lack of imagination than intense devotion that, after he got his first Labrador retriever Willie in the 70s, my subject loved him so much that he named all subsequent dogs after him.
There was a Willie II, a Willie III, and a Willie IV.
Going through decades of photos, I saw the important distinctions in the dynasty.
I learned that some anecdote could only be ascribed to Willie III, for example, not Willie I or II, and definitely not IV.
It’s been quite a while since we’ve talked but I’m sometimes tempted to reach out and see if there’s been a Willie V or even a VI.
Actually, let’s be honest: I’m certain there has.
Me trying to explain social media to Vlad.
Before Vlad came along I pondered if I would follow the path of my duck hunting friend.
In other words, had I found my breed and gender?
I even recalled how almost a decade ago someone gave me––with the best intentions––the materials whereby one could obtain the genetic samples needed to clone one’s dog.
All it would take was a single, painless cheek swab––and $15,000 yearly fee for a very specific storage facility in Hawaii.
And indeed if Barbra Streisand famously spent $100,000 to clone Miss Violet and Miss Scarlett from her beloved Coton de Tulear Samantha, why shouldn’t everyone?
Yes, the financing is prohibitive and the ethics moderately questionable, but beyond that it’s obviously unnecessary to go to such lengths to find an ideal companion.
The world is full of amazing canines without the need to clone replacements.
I will, however, confess that alongside the butter in my refrigerator I have a tiny vial of Belle’s blood that the vet somehow gave me after an exam in 2013.
I’m not intending to clone her, but inspired by Angelina Jolie in the Billy Bob Thornton days, I’ve sometimes reached out to several goth jewelry designers on Etsy.
There’s a surprising number with experience creating blood pendants, probably because there’s a not-surprising number of those of us who find it very hard to let go.
The way Vlad came into my life had its own kind of magic.
And part of it is that there was a huge sense of relief that I wasn’t recreating (and certainly not cloning) my past experiences with Belle.
They are both heaven-sent but the differences are striking.
Vlad’s very much a cis boy and Belle was totally a lady.
(As an example, when a lovely friend offered to watch him for a few hours while I was a guest at a Christmas Day lunch, uninvited, Vlad jumped into the shower with her.)
And rather than a purebred with papers, Vlad’s a totally scruffy mutt.
Finally, instead of a gift from my little sister, he was a double rescue.
Originally from a shelter in Georgia, transported to Westchester, then adopted by idiots, and then returned before I triumphantly claimed him.
Come to think of it, given his southern roots, perhaps there’s even a distant genetic relationship to Willie V or VI…?
Given all that’s happened, anything is possible.
I stopped halfway through Tick Tick…Boom! (the acclaimed Jonathan Larson biopic on Netflix) to write this newsletter.
I didn’t know him well at all (but I knew him a little).
So, after reminding you that, as Bukowski says, when it comes to the New Year (or the next breath) you can always:
“Drink from the well of yourself and begin again.”
Beyond that, when it comes to experience, perhaps stop trying to clone the past and welcome the new miracles (and the mutts).
And finally, and most importantly, when it comes to a standard for measuring the year in your life, as Jonathan’s song wisely suggests:
“How about love?”
Namaste for Now,
