Begin Again
For ourselves and nature
It is New Year’s season. The calendar stretches ahead of us, blank and encouraging. People resolve to cultivate new habits—more exercise, meditation, reading; less procrastination, social media, gossiping. A new beginning promises a New You™!
Inevitably, we don’t do everything we intend. But the solution is simply to Begin Again, an inspiration with many roots.1
Syncing to Seasons
New Year’s rituals feel mostly arbitrary.
January 1 falls just after the Winter Solstice, so from nature’s perspective New Year’s Day almost makes sense. But while the nights are now gradually shortening—12 minutes shorter today than on the solstice where I live—winter hardly feels like it has arrived here in the Northwest. In the lowlands, we haven’t had a hard frost yet. I know this is a harbinger of winters to come with the new climate caused by the befouling to the old one by human industrial activity.
Syncing to seasons is becoming more complicated—just ask the plants and animals that take their cues from temperatures versus length of daylight.
But is winter, where we’ve lodged our “New Year,” a time of ending or beginning? Winter is senescent; spring is fresh, a season of renewal. And for most of my life, the beginning of the school year made more sense as the time to commit to building from a clean slate.
Still, tradition holds that we resolve in January. We begin again when the days are short. So be it.
Simply Begin Again
A common resolution many make this time of year is to start (or revive) a meditation practice. As countless teachers and practitioners have noted, meditation is simple, but not easy.
Usually, instructions are to focus on an object, most often your breath, and stay with it moment by moment.
Soon, you will notice that you are focused on lunch, or taxes, or the pain in your neck, or your first-grade teacher. When you notice this, the instructions say, you simply begin again.
Like the years and resolutions, the attentional cycle does not flow in one direction; it cycles: Start. Wander off. Begin again. Start. Wander off. Begin again.
The emotional flow can be something like: Excitement, Boredom, Frustration, Recommitment.
Do it enough, and frustration can grow. Why can’t you stay focused, doing the same thing, even with hours and hours of practice? But in that are the lessons.
I begin again a lot. Stalling out while writing is commonplace. (I’ve left this page and this room multiple times while drafting and revising these words.) To finish means sticking to it but also, inevitably, beginning again. And again.
It is a skill, a mindset, a practice, an opportunity.
I have to expend some effort to remember this lesson, because I am often more comfortable with frustration than with patience.
A paradox lives in the heart of this attention gap. We want to kick ourselves when we realize we’ve gotten distracted or off track yet again. But the moment we realize we have drifted off, we are back focusing on the moment or the task at hand, which is the goal. No need to chastise ourselves. You’ve already begun again.
Beginning Again in Nature
Given all this seasonal context, then, I’ve been thinking about starting over. When a podcast rotated into my feed about recovery of salmon on the Elwha River, it seemed fortuitous.
“A river runs through it…once again” tells the unfolding story of what happens when dams no longer block salmon streams. I encourage you to spend half an hour listening to this story.
The history at Elwha is long (a friend has written a fine book on it) and worth understanding. When local tribes and environmentalists managed to attract enough political attention to demand the removal of dams, a new river began, and an old river returned.
It’s complicated, of course. You cannot erect a dam, leave it for a century, remove it, and expect everything to return as it was. But salmon returned. Life history strategies for various organisms have changed. Some migratory birds no longer have to migrate because their food is more abundant with fish in the stream again. The sediment held back for a century made its way into the Strait of Juan de Fuca and is creating new marine habitat. Ancient and new systems, swirling together, beginning again.
Further south in the Oregon-California borderland, and a decade later, the Klamath River is now freed, too. Recent reports indicate restoration has begun. “I watched the river re-establish itself there forevermore,” said Ren Brownell, a spokesperson for the Klamath River Renewal Corporation.
Nature has begun again.
Patience
Not every dam can come out, of course. But dam removal was beyond mainstream consideration in my youth. Things that feel permanent in 2025 will be transitory, too, but predicting that is hard.
The global climate cannot just “begin again” on any sort of time scale meaningful to humans either.
“Begin Again” is no panacea for all things, at all times.
But, as the salmon swimming upstream in Elwha and Klamath waters demonstrate, sometimes something transformative happens from beginning again.
Endnotes
New Writing. A new story from me is out. I tagged along with a couple groups conducting the local Audubon’s annual Christmas Bird Count. It was great fun, and you can read about the serious business involved and why people do it here.
As I’ve mentioned in recent posts, some changes are coming in 2025. One of them is I’m dispensing with the weekly categories—The Classroom, etc. Topics will still likely circle in similar ways, just less deliberately and structured.
Very Nice