The squirrels are at it again. It’s my fault, I know. We have a tradition of giving them a giant bag of walnuts from a neighboring farm on New Year’s Day. We know how stupid this is, but when there are thirty squirrels in your yard gamboling around like goofs, it makes for a pretty celebratory way to start the year. But now, of course, they’re feeling entitled to a New Year’s Day, every day.

A whole scurry of them were in between me and the bay laurel tree last night when I needed a bay leaf for the soup. I waved my hands to shoo them away, but they stood on the ledge in a line and waved their paws back at me. Standing on their hind legs. In a line. They raised their paws at me like the proletariats in Battleship Potemkin. I laughed because it was ridiculous, but I’ve got to say, I was impressed by their commitment. They were feeling it.

J, fourteen, and creator of Squirrel New Year, glides sideways into the kitchen, pivoting heel toe, heel toe, her stockinged feet hidden beneath twin pools of denim. She likes any story about an animal, maybe especially a squirrel, so I turn from the stockpot to excitedly explain why the soup might not taste quite right. I’ve really worked myself into a full reenactment on the Odessa Steps and I’m expecting her to laugh, with her hand over her mouth, in that way she does when I’ve told an especially funny story. But she doesn’t laugh at all. Instead, she looks at me with a look somewhere between generosity and pity, head tilted to the left, brows lifted in sympathy, the way you might look at a real simpleton, but one you’re pretty fond of. She shakes her head and tells me plainly — they’re suffering.

I protest, pointing out their almost comically emblematic bright eyes and bushy tails, the litter of so many walnut shells on our table, in the herb pots, the evidence of a fairly cruise-y January. But J, who through some odd good fortune has a mindfulness studies requirement in her freshman year (and if that doesn’t sound like good fortune to you, that’s ok, I can understand that feeling too — but it’s been an absolute boon for J) explains to me that it’s an elemental, emotional equation. There are two paths to suffering: pain plus resistance, and pleasure plus grasping: both equal suffering. I, who have no sense of why I’m struggling when I struggle (which is mostly always) am rapt. Go on. The first kind, she continues, isn’t the squirrels’ problem. Feeling pain is inevitable, but time spent consumed with trying to avoid pain is the part that really gets us down. Hearts break, resistance is futile. Fall in love anyway. I glance up at a squirrel flinging itself from limb to high-up, spindly limb and nod. Heard. The squirrels’ problem is the second one. The walnuts that we scoop from the big, black garbage bag and fling into the meadow like two krewe debutants tossing doubloons, are so good and the abundance is so overwhelming that the squirrels are obsessed with recreating the jackpot and can’t enjoy a field otherwise cached with food. They’re both, she tells me, as she pivot-glides back out of the room, a kind of clinging. And clinging, she hollers from halfway down the hallway, is the worst.

I imagine her mindfulness studies teacher would be pleased that J carried the lesson into the backyard with surprising Sciurus clarity. And maybe, just because the vibes are high, I could be forgiven that it took me fifty-four years and a bag of nuts to see anything at all. But I see it, in this season of our lives and of this work. Being a being slightly more complicated than a squirrel, being human, means having the capacity of being aware of our own extraordinary but often extraordinarily clingy nature. Our capacity for suffering. An understanding both beautiful and bittersweet, as it comes with the realization of our unlikely existence and extreme vulnerability, but also our collective capability for imagination, for creative acts, for action.

To cope with this potentially overwhelming knowledge, we’ve developed a remarkable capacity that may be the pinnacle of our conscious evolution and the antidote to suffering’s cling: hope.

Hope — and the thoughtful, effective action it can inspire — is the counterweight to our heavy sense of our need to cling. To anything. It is a continual negotiation between optimism and despair, a continual negation of cynicism and naïveté. We hope precisely because we are aware that terrible outcomes are always possible and often probable, but so too are the moments of buoying beauty, understanding and abundance. That the choices we make, daily, individually and in the scurry of community, will always impact the outcomes. This season and this work, today, is ours. These wines, for you.

Happy New Year. Every damn day.

~MH