THE MEANING OF JANUARY

JANUARY IS THE  TWO-FACED MONTH

Named  for the Roman God Janus who looked both forward and backwards, January is a month that  signals both endings and beginnings.
I myself have endured a long SENSE OF AN ENDING  and now I am struggling to  get a renewed sense of BEGINNING.

January

Helen Hunt Jackson

O Winter! frozen pulse and heart of fire, 
What loss is theirs who from thy kingdom turn 
Dismayed, and think thy snow a sculptured urn 
Of death! Far sooner in midsummer tire 
The streams than under ice. June could not hire 
Her roses to forego the strength they learn 
In sleeping on thy breast. No fires can burn 
The bridges thou dost lay where men desire 
In vain to build. 
                                O Heart, when Love’s sun goes 
To northward, and the sounds of singing cease, 
Keep warm by inner fires, and rest in peace. 
Sleep on content, as sleeps the patient rose. 
Walk boldly on the white untrodden snows, 
The winter is the winter’s own release.

Helen Hunt Jackson was a friend of the poet Emily Dickinson and  known  more for her novels than her poems.. But I  have always liked this poem, a sonnet she wrote,  about January because it captures the duplicity and complexity of that  time of the year.

In January I myself vacillate wildly between making plans for the future and summing up the meaning and  teachings of the past year.  I think that is where we should be: accepting the ambiguity of the time and the ambiguity of  our lives. The poem asks us to be where we humans  find it most difficult to be as we dread the future and lament the past, but cannot fully be present in the moment. As Jackson so wisely concludes:THE WINTER IS THE WINTER'S OWN RELEASE.