27 January 2025
Winter/New Year 2025
Keith Snyder
Resident Priest and Managing Director
It is interesting that even though the transition from December 31 to January 1 is no different from moving from any day to the next, the beginning of a new year brings with it feelings of having crossed over into something new - a New Year, a chance to make this one better than the last. We feel refreshed and ready for what life will bring.
One day follows the next, all throughout the year. One day is as “good” as the next, but sometimes we designate certain days as special – a birthday, a holy day, a holiday, a commemoration of some sort. When we do this our minds are directed to something that has meaning in our lives. The way we think influences the way we feel, just as the way we feel influences the way we think. When we think of January 1st as the first day of a New Year, we feel the energy of the birth of the year and the possibilities it brings. Like a newborn baby it is full of potential.
In Japan there is a custom in the imperial court of choosing a poetical theme for the New Year. This year’s theme is “dream,” or yume 夢 in Japanese. I would say that most of the time when this single character is depicted on a mounted writing, it is used in the sense of “the impermanence of all things in this world.” It refers to the brevity of human life. When someone dies we are puzzled at how they could be here with us one day and then suddenly they are gone, like a dream.
Another meaning of yume, however, is that of a vision for the future. It is to hope for better things. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I have a dream” speech is this type of dream. He starts the speech with a deploring of the continued demeaning of the lives of African Americans in the United States. But this realism is followed by the idealism of the last part of the speech, in which he describes his vision of a United States in which not only would the racially oppressed be free of the hatred and discrimination directed toward them, but in which black children and white children would be holding hands “as sisters and brothers.” It is a vision for all of America, not just for one group. The poet Walt Whitman wrote: “Of Equality – as if it harmed me, giving others the same chances and rights as myself – as if it were not indispensable to my own rights that others possess the same.”
When we mentally look to a future which is better than the present time, we use our imaginations. Sometimes I think that because of movies, tv, the internet, etc., our imaginations have become weak. As much as I enjoy a good movie, the movie version of a book is never as good as the book, and I think this is because a book engages our imaginations in a way that a movie cannot. The Mahayana Sutras were recorded (in writing) at a time when audio visual media did not exist. The people who wrote and read/recited them must have had very strong and active imaginations because they are colorful to an extreme. Sometimes they are positively psychedelic (see The Lotus Sutra, The Flower Wreath Sutra, The Pure Land Sutras, etc.).
An important teaching in Buddhism is the notion that “every day is a good day,” which is not to say that it is good because the sun is shining, I’m feeling fine and everything is going my way. Certainly in that sense we could not say “every day,” because every day is not that way at all. The phrase is used to emphasize the importance of exerting ourselves to make the best of the situation we find ourselves in each day. It tells us to forget about yesterday, forget about tomorrow; this is the moment that counts. The counterculture spiritual movements of the 1960’s used the expressions “be here now” and “this is it,” to indicate the same feeling. However, there are also times when we really must look ahead and imagine how the world we live in could be a better place for us and for future generations. On top of that, we must work to make that happen. We must keep those dreams alive.