The Joy of a New Year
Happy 2024! – Ahhhh, the feeling of a fresh start… out with the holidays, time to clean up. My mom always filled her ceramic ring of white geese with white cyclamen in January and set it on our kitchen table.
There’s something perfect about the color white for the new year. In the north lands it comes by snow, but it can also come through your inbox. I just received the Jennifer Behr email with her Pearl Edit.http://www.jenniferbehr.com Personally, I can’t afford Jennifer Behr accessories, but I love pearls. Margaret means pearl so I’ve been blessed with my husband’s gift of pearls over our 34 years of marriage. Thus inspired, I put on my pearl earrings yesterday and admired their lustrous, moon glow white. White is the color of innocence, purity and resurrection. We travel from the reds and greens of Christmas which combine to give us the purple of Lent and we arrive in the lily white of Easter, all in a few weeks.
Which brings me to the white peacock we recently met at a wildlife refuge. Ever since childhood days of walking the zoo at Fin n’ Feather Farm in Dundee, IL, I’ve admired these elegant birds.
The ancient Greeks believed that the peacock never decayed after death so it became a sign of immortality. Today, the white peacock represents spiritual awakening and renewal, even Jesus Christ himself. Seeing one in a dream is an experience which connects us to the divine. When we saw this white peacock at the wildlife center it felt otherworldly, so unique that it carried the breath and life of heaven. It also remained silent and above on its perch, unlike all the other birds cawing and mawing the ground or their cages.
I like to pick a word to carry me through the year and this year I think I’ll pick white. Our son and daughter-in-law have a new baby whose undefiled by the world innocence captivates our hearts. Our daughter and son-in-law are expecting identical twins in January, and my second novel is launching in June. All of these experiences bring light out of darkness. The birth canal for a baby or a book can be a dark passage, but on the other side we pray comes bright and inestimable light.
What’s your word for the year? Be blessed,
Margaret
p.s. My husband told me that when all the colors of the spectrum of light, like in a rainbow combine you get white. So cool.