“Rain is no respecter of persons
the snow doesn’t give a soft white
damn Whom it touches” — ee cummings

Before Christmas it snowed all night, a small snow, slight and fleeting, gone within a few days. All night the world was snow-hushed quiet and in the morning people chipped away at the silence with snow ploughs and shovels. Days later we had an ice storm, which came with a cold constant clattering against windows and roofs all night long. The ice stubbornly refused to leave: It’s too cold for it to melt, but the stinging wind had eroded enough to reveal bristling pale grass and frost-laced dirt. On New Year’s Day the snow surprised us. Unforecasted. Sneaking in the night between our ghosts’ trips around the house. We woke to a world as white and blank as a clean sheet of paper. Snow on ice on snow on hard frozen earth.

These past weeks have been a spirit-infested dream of trying to cling to rare moments of being with people we love and to memories of people we’ve lost. Christmas morning the sky was layered with glowing pink clouds, the white-throated sparrow was singing, and the world felt okay, considering. The Christmas lights reflected the light in the sky. We try so hard to capture it. The light in the sky was quickly gone, and the Christmas lights will come down soon.

It can feel discouraging this time of year, when you wake in the dark morning and the nights draw in early and the cold is relentless. It can make you regret the flowers and warmth and leaves. But on a walk through salt-crusted streets rimmed with slippery snow and ice I realized that with the leaves gone I suddenly noticed how many berry-laden trees we have in this town. The robins gathered by the hundreds, singing their sweet cheerio cheerily cheerio cheerily, eating berries the bright rusty color of their bellies. Their slight weight bent the small ice-glazed branches with a beautiful crackling sound, and they gave Clio dog and me a questioning look as we passed beneath them. In the whitegold winter light, the berries and the birds were brighter and warmer than any Christmas decorations, but they’ll soon fly away, too.

I’m not feeling very resolutionary this year. I’m feeling a little grey and tired in that January way. But as often happens, writing about it has strengthened my resolve. As I’ve said before, to me, “resolution” doesn’t mean to give something up or lose weight or eat more healthily, but to bring into focus in the photographic sense, or to become harmonious in the resolution-of-a-problem sense: to be solved, or healed. To notice everything with keen focus, and feel grateful. I’ve been thinking about how many typical New Year’s resolutions face inward, they’re about ways to change yourself and make yourself healthier or more successful. We got a message from a fortune cookie recently that said, “Only when free from projections, we can be aware of reality.” Well, I’d like to respectfully disagree with the fortune cookie. I believe it’s all projections. It’s all images and moments that we create and collect: the sunshine and shadow, the bright vivid colors and the dusky quiet times.

And just as we’re the authors of our own stories, we’re the auteurs of our own film: we decide how everything is connected. We connect all the flickering moments. And I’d like mine to be inspired by Ozu and Tati. Quiet and thoughtful, generous, human in all the best ways, humorous, beautiful within each frame and from frame to frame. Celebrating the oddness and worth of ordinary moments, of our shared absurdity.

Of course, “projection” also means casting our ideas and our stories outside of ourselves. Shining a light through them and sharing them with others, and creating an understanding of everything else through the experiences and lives of others. Empathy. It’s sadly lacking in the world today. And this time of year, as people reflect on the past and make plans for their future, you might find yourself thinking in the middle of the night about all the people who have ever lived. Everyone who has walked on this earth, and lived, and loved, and wanted, and worked. Some in good fortune and freedom and wealth; most, probably, in poverty and servitude. But all wanting the same things, surely: affection, friendship, some degree of comfort, a kind hand, a warm meal. On a cold night when the world is blanketed in snow, which is “… falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead,” you might resolve to be on the side of kindness and generosity. You might resolve not to be distracted by our fast, cold, cluttered, cynical old world from clarity, light, and warmth.

So on this day of new beginnings, of blank white pages, we’ll think of this, too. We’ll think of focusing, reflecting, projecting, in the glowing hopeful lengthening days.