Dear Friends,

The turn to the new year already feels long past, or like it never happened. Pandemic time works like that, I guess. I didn’t mark the transition to 2022 with any ritual or special notice. It was a Friday, and then it was a Saturday, and the smooth monotony of time was all I felt. “This New Year will arrive as it always does: in the night, as the earth begins another orbit around the sun, racing at some 67,000 miles per hour into an unknown future,” a New York Times journalist wrote recently in a piece about the ambiguous experience of time. Calendars are arbitrary, malleable things; there have been, and still are, many systems for tracking our days. The 1st of January only begins one of many cycles of the earth’s orbit around the sun. Every day could potentially be the beginning – or the end – of an orbit. Pick a point, start counting. Follow the path. You will end up back where you started.

The internet is lousy with end-of-year this and that posts. The best of everything and anything lists. I scanned a few of them, looking for things I might have missed, mostly on the subject of music. NPR Music is my default portal to new music, so I regularly browse the lists created by its diverse crew of music journalists. On the whole, though, these obligatory lists are tedious and repetitive (if you haven’t yet had your fill, check out this compilation of all the year-end lists). More interesting to me are the reflections shared by writers I appreciated throughout the year. Austin Kleon’s “100 things that made my year” is filled with links to eclectic scraps of people doing, making, and writing creative things; he’s a prolific blogger so each link offers further reflection and context to explore. And looking to the year ahead, Maria Popova (also a voracious collector and writer on... well, what it means to be fully human) shared “Resolutions for a Life Worth Living: Attainable Aspirations Inspired by Great Humans of the Past” with words and wisdom from James Baldwin, Hannah Arendt, and others. Over at “The Convivial Society” Substack, Michael Sacasas writes on technology and culture through the lens of his scholarly work on Ivan Illich. His end-of-year post “Living In Expectation of the Unexpected Gift” walked a thoughtful path through the notion that the digital tools peddled by technology companies ever promise a more liberated version of ourselves which never seems to materialize. In closing the post, he offers some advice to himself at the start of the new year for the reader’s benefit. One, in particular, I may write on my forehead as a reminder: “Attend to the ordinary and the mundane with care and with gratitude.”

It takes about 365 days for the earth to complete one orbit around the sun. A day is the full rotation of the earth on its axis. The moon orbits the earth on average every 29.53 days (depending on the point from which it is measured). The sun, earth, and moon are spheres. These spheres move in circles. This cosmic system of circularity reminds me that time, too, is cyclical and subject to perceptual variability. It’s finite – for us – but in many ways open and abundant. Confronted by this strange duality, I can, within certain limits, choose how best to spend my days. Like Oliver Burkeman says: “At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been.” The new year begins tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, et cetera. Every day, the beginning of a new year, can be a marker of renewed attention to the things that matter most.

I played a lot of music this year, thanks to the repair and subsequent rediscovery of a beautiful 1948 D-18 Martin acoustic guitar that my dad passed on to me. He picked it up at a garage sale in the early ‘70s for next to nothing, and invested a little money in it occasionally to keep it playable. My first experience with a guitar was as a kid banging and fumbling rudimentary chords on his Martin – and, regrettably, abusing the thing. Or maybe, to my dad’s credit, he let me have at it without too much concern. Instruments should be played and loved, even if not so gently, especially by young musical explorers, because that is one way my love of music was nurtured. In my possession decades later, the guitar suffered a near fatal accident: trip, fall, cruuuuunch! Yet another instance of a young musician loving the instrument freely, getting caught up in the excitement of the sound, and maybe not paying close enough attention to caring for it.

For months, we hemmed and hawed about getting it fixed, and eventually did so with the expert help of Jake Wildwood, Vermont’s “country guitar doctor”, who patched the Martin up and performed a full “reset” on it. It’s never played better. It’s an instrument that sounds and feels so right you want to play it all the time. It looks great, too, with its decades-old amber honey patina, with its scratches and scars, worn-in dirt. So, for the better part of this past year I played the guitar all the time. The music I made, the music everyone in my family (also musicians) made, the songs we sang – this was a sustaining joy that got us through the year 2021. Orbiting around each other, finding harmony in chords and melodies, inhabiting pandemic time together in this way – time smoothed out, was stretched thin and tensile. Sometimes the hours and days vibrated, like strings on a guitar. Sometimes the vibrations were discordant, atonal, grating on the nerves; one more turn of the tuning peg might snap the string. But, more often than not, we settled in together, harmonious, the music of spheres large and small spinning in circular time.

In harmony,

Jeremy