It’s a new year, and while I don’t tend to get swept up in the cultural to-do list that often surrounds a new year (resolutions, anyone?), I do like to mark the passing of one year into another.
It started in 2009. We had just moved to a new town with a much more spiritually open-minded culture, and I saw a set of prayer flags in a local bookstore while out doing my Yule/Christmas shopping. I picked them up, thinking of all the times I’d admired them in the past but stopped short of buying them. Now, living in a free-spirited, interfaith community, I felt a deep freedom in scooping up this little gift to hang over our front door!
They were opened on Christmas morning, but somehow got left behind in the shuffle of the next few days as we played with new toys, watched new movies, and returned to the flow of work and chores. Then, realizing I’d already waited until the 28th to unwrap them, we made the choice to wait until New Year’s Day to hang them.
2009 had been a big year for my family in many ways. It was a year in which we made a conscious decision to move out of a town that held the security and safety of family nearby (but lacked religious, political, and ideological diversity) and into a small, progressive haven of the southeast. We’d made a choice to move to an area where the prevailing culture would support our intentions to raise our children to be compassionate, aware of social justice issues, attentive to the environment, and encouraged to explore within their hearts and souls for guidance and wisdom. It wasn’t easy to make that move, but it freed our hearts in so many ways!
And so on January 1, 2010, we gathered our children (then ages three through fourteen) into the living room. We sipped some hot cocoa while talking about the past year — its triumphs and heartaches, what worked and what didn’t. Then we passed the prayer flags around the room. Each person took their turn sharing their hopes and dreams for the coming year while holding the prayer flags in their hands. I hoped for more patience as a mother, and to make more time for family; one of my three year olds hoped for puppies and rainbows. We each took at least one turn, and after we’d all poured our intentions into the family as well as the flags, we hung them over our main entrance, where they’d fly every day, carrying our hopes out on the wind and serving as a daily reminder of our intentions.
When New Year’s Eve rolled around almost a year later, we had the new set of flags ready to hang the next day! One thing… What to do with the prior year’s flags? It didn’t seem right to leave them hanging, but it also felt odd to just put them in the trash. So, that evening, we passed the old flags around while talking about the prior year. We laughed at funny memories. We shared sentimental feelings about memories from the prior year that had tugged at our hearts. We talked about what we liked, and what we didn’t. And then we started a fire, and burned the old, faded, worn flags. The next morning, we again focused on the coming year as we passed around the new flags before hanging them.
This is a tradition that has stuck with our family over the past several years, and this year we even made our own flags, with most of them hand-dyed.
After making a string of flags to hang over our door, we had a TON of extra dyed fabric, so we even made a string of “Joy Flags” to hang out in the yard. We don’t expect to replace those annually with the same intention as our prayer flags, and we filled them with all sorts of things that we like, each member of the family contributing a dozen or so flags to the cause. Our little ones drew pictures of our pets, stick-figure drawings of our family, hearts, and “I Love You.” Our big kids drew symbols and art they find inspiring along with fandom references and funny quotes. Mom and Dad wrote affirmations, drew symbols, and single-word reminders. As they fly in our yard in the years to come (until they become too tattered to leave up), may they remind us of the joy we find in each other, in our family, and in our home and surrounding area.
You don’t have to ring in the new year with “resolutions,” promises, and new pressures on yourself to ring it in with tradition and intention. Heartfelt expressions of joy and gratitude; focusing on a new year filled with love, light, and laughter; and sacred time with simple family rituals — these have the power to change our lives for the better, from our attitudes to our realities, from our families out into the world. May 2014 be a beautiful and blessed year for you and yours.
2014 prayer flags hanging over our door!
