I sit at my desk, looking out at the river. It runs parallel to our street—River Street—down a little gully. You can’t see it in the warmer months, when the leaves of the trees form a dense scrim. But when the cold sets in, the curtain lifts and reveals the sight of water the color of green tourmaline. This view is a gift of this season. Today it is also my birthday gift.
While I often come up with some mantra-like name for each year of my life, I don’t know what I’m calling this year yet. 35 feels like a slab of granite: solid, heavy, unremarkable. Asking to be carved and shaped—it is what you make of it.
A few weeks ago, I was visiting with my mother’s friend Carol. She had a book of the I-Ching, also known as the Book of Changes, and asked if I wanted to consult it. The I-Ching is a form of ancient Chinese divination, a way of revealing something about your future. It dates back to 1000 B.C. John Cage famously used it to create his “chance music” compositions, magnificent clusters of tones that sound like a cat walking atop piano keys.
I’ve always been fascinated by oracular methods, from tarot to astrology to tea leaves. I don’t think of them as some immoveable authority; I believe that they hold as much truth as you believe they do—that they will give back to you whatever you invest in them. Take what you want from it and discard the rest. I see these methods more as lighthouses leading the curious traveler to some new harbor rather than as scripture. So I came to Carol’s I-Ching with an open mind and heart, curious what spark of an idea it might light in me.
The way it works is, you throw a set of three bronze coins. The value of the coins translates to either an unbroken line or a broken one. You mark these lines on a page in descending order. After six tosses, you wind up with a hexagram that looks like a piece of architecture—perhaps a lighthouse, or a treehouse, or a turret:
My coin tosses yielded hexagram 4—“Youthful Folly.” There was plenty in this description that I discarded, that didn’t fit, but the part that resonated was this: a fresh innocence brings good fortune.
A week later, I was in a large studio space, attending my first dance class since college. This was another birthday gift, the gift of returning to a part of myself, of doing something just for me. The gift of making weird shapes with my body, unselfconscious, leaping across the floor alongside an 80-year-old woman and a soft-spoken software engineer, all of us moving (like ice cracking! said the instructor) with bent limbs as we collided in contact improv. We danced and made an architecture of our bodies. The lines of ourselves broken and unbroken. It was freedom, it was fresh innocence, it was good fortune.
It felt so good to do something so visceral and silly, with no goal other than to be there with the full, wide-eyed presence of a child. A bit of youthful folly. For all the fear I have of getting older, of being only five years from forty (!), this is the antidote, the energy to hold onto like a bronze coin and fling into the world.
My favorite piece of art at the Clark Art Institute in my hometown was always Edgar Degas’s sculpture Little Dancer. First exhibited in 1881, the sculpture shocked for its realism—it depicted not the traditional elegant ballerina but an awkward adolescent. Degas took a chance, and some people criticized him for it, calling the piece “hideously ugly.” I always thought the Dancer was beautiful, a vision in bronze with a real tulle tutu and satin ribbon. To me, she looks unconcerned with her leg turned out and her arms held back. She poses for no one but herself.
Is that a fox? Zack asks as we pass Samascott Orchards.
In the afternoon of my birthday, we go on a family outing to a nearby town we love. It’s sunny and mild, and after so many frigid birthdays, this too is a gift. We get chai lattes and bagels and walk the rail trail while River naps in the carrier. It isn’t easy coordinating it all—cup, food, baby—and I have to pick cream cheese out of my hair, but it’s all so lovely and delicious, I don’t care.
I look over to the rows of trees where Zack is pointing, and sure enough, there’s a red fox just sitting there. Two perfect ear tufts rising like twin flames from the grass. Foxes are normally active at dusk, but this one seems not at all bothered to be out and about in the middle of the day. Suddenly, from a nearby hillock comes a second fox, sweeping the great ginger brush of its tail as it trots over to the first. They nip and bat at each other, leaping and dancing, coalescing briefly into a fortress of fur. And then they saunter back into the trees and are gone.
Of course I take it as a sign. Here I am, already working on a piece about bringing a carefree, child-like perspective into this year of my life, and the universe offers up a double dose of fox. Symbol of playfulness and mischief, with a high-pitched chatter that sounds like laughter.
It is not lost on me that the town we visit is called Kinderhook, which means, in Dutch, “children’s corner.”
So maybe I’ll call 35 the Year of Youthful Folly.
The Year of the Dancer, Year of the Fox.
The Lighthouse Year—a reminder, a guide.
Perhaps it’s just the year of not taking things so seriously, remembering that life can be a coin toss, a playful composition, a conglomeration of chance.
It can be a river winking away like a magic trick behind the trees, waiting to be revealed.
Mrs. Samascott (long gone, to be sure) babysat my son, now 52. He took his first steps at her house when I wasn't there to see them. A lighter touch in the new year would be salutary for all of us. No doubt.