My first story of 2020 lamented the new year’s most state-shaking change: The loss, after a half-century, of the annual Vermont Life calendar.
“Nobody’s happy,” Tod Gross, manager of Phoenix Books in Burlington, sighed last January. “I have customers now saying, ‘What am I going to do?’”
If only that was 2020’s biggest question.
By spring, Vermonters facing a stay-at-home pandemic order read about the Covid-19 deaths of 64-year-old twin brothers Cleon and Leon Boyd, whose families along the border of West Dover and Wilmington reported so many virus cases, the local per capita rate swelled to more than four times the state average.
“We’re assuming paths crossed and germs were shared,” one survivor told me. “But from where?”
By summer, the Minneapolis police killing of Minnesotan George Floyd sparked Black Lives Matter protests and calls for law enforcement changes throughout Vermont.
“We’re at a chasm,” Brattleboro resident Emily Megas-Russell said at a meeting of a resulting Community Safety Review Committee. “It’s our responsibility to stand at the edge of that precipice together and ask ourselves, ‘How do we look at this question of community safety from a place that includes every person’s sense of it?’”
By fall, the skyrocketing stress of the pandemic and presidential election had everyone inquiring how to cope with it all. That’s when, asking experts, I noticed a pattern: Even the answers were questions.
“Clearly there’s a lot we don’t have control over, but we can ponder upon what you do have control over,” Brattleboro Retreat psychologist Dr. Jilisa Snyder said. “Ask yourself, ‘Where do I have choices about how I want to be during this crisis?’”
“We can stop mid-sentence, mid-narrative, mid-pushing and pulling and return to the present moment,” Vermont analyst and author Polly Young-Eisendrath added. “Say to yourself, ‘What’s arising now? What’s possible now?’”
Plenty, former Vermont state poet Louise Glück learned when she won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature.
“You want to know how I spend my time?” Glück begins one work in her book “The Wild Iris.”
I walk the front lawn, pretending
to be weeding. You ought to know
I’m never weeding, on my knees, pulling
clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact
I’m looking for courage, for some evidence
my life will change, though
it takes forever, checking
each clump for the symbolic
leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already
the leaves turning, always the sick trees
going first, the dying turning
brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform
their curfew of music. You want to see my hands?
As empty now as at the first note.
Or was the point always
to continue without a sign?
The year 2021 is ringing in a new calendar — and old questions. When will the darkness recede? When will the light return?
I pondered that as I plugged into a recent “Longest Night” winter solstice service. The online program, reciting a quote from the late poet Rainer Maria Rilke, offered a century-old yet current-day response.
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves,” Rilke penned. “The point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
