touch | Sally Wiener Grotta

January 2022 Newsletter

New Year’s Eve has come and gone once more. For a few hours, the entire world paused to acknowledge the passing of another year. By dawn on January 2nd, nearly all echoes of Happy New Year and Good Riddance to 2021 had faded away, and we resumed our lives. What intrigues me is that pause, or more specifically the nature of a year, which is nothing more than a human construct.

Time is woven into the fabric of the universe, but calendars are something else entirely. Though we imbue calendars with all sorts of metaphysical and poetic meaning, they are merely our attempt to control nature, hoping to impose our will onto the ongoing circling of planets and stars. But where is the beginning and end in a circle?

Calendars were invented to measure and compartmentalize time into hours, days, months and years. They organize society, mark agricultural seasons, and track our responsibilities to the government, to our religion(s), and to each other. In other words, their primary purpose is bureaucratic.

So what is New Year’s Eve? What is January 1st? For that matter, what is June 12th or 5:18 PM? Why do these abstract concepts define our lives? Read More

I return over and over again to hands, to touch, to the beginning of story which is also a type of touch my mother taught me. But in a time when loving means not touching, regardless of how much we ache for and need our loved ones’ touch, remembering my mother’s hands fills an emptiness that memory also creates.

A few days ago, the author Ellen Kushner posted a poem on Facebook, “Blackberries” by Margaret Atwood. In response, I wrote “I look at my hands and see my mother’s touch.” I knew it was the beginning of a poem, of such intimate memories that I wasn’t quite ready to sit down and let it flow through me. Some memories can’t be allowed to blossom until the heart is soft enough to not fear the pain and the beauty of lost loves, past moments that can never again be reclaimed. Then, this morning, I looked in the mirror, held my hands to my face, and I knew I had the strength once more to be soft.