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Not bothering with resolutions, I celebrate the New Year by hiking. I start
with the hills in the park nearby, legs burning from doing nothing all fall, all year. Days later
I hike out to Headwaters, find myself soaked in sweat and struggling to catch my breath
trudging up the two-mile hill above three-mile bridge. Yesterday, I hiked out to Fern Canyon, almost
nine miles out and back under a damp gray sky. I walked utterly alone, only a chickadee
to shape the emptiness with its song. She reminded me of the girls in my high school choir, the ones who seemed
almost invisible with their plain faces, their dowdy clothes, until they began to sing—and you would suddenly discover
you knew nothing about them: those living miracles. Until then, at most you saw was your own reflection
on the surface of the waters. I don't know where a single one of them lives now, or what they do, or who loves them,
but walking into the mist gradually dissolving into rain, I hope they are all still singing—in the shower, at a coffee shop,
in the golden harmonies of another choir. Opening their mouths and making everything ordinary blossom so as to awaken us all
to what we so blindly missed, resting on the foolish assumption we already understood the universe and our pale place within it.
David Holper
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