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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

The Rural Life
New Year’s Eve

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: December 31, 2007

At midnight tonight, the horses on this farm will age a year. That is  
the custom — every horse has the same birthday, Jan. 1. Like all  
things calendrical, this is a human convention. When it comes to  
equine conventions, I know enough to notice some of the simpler forms  
of precedence: who goes first through a gate, who gets to the grain  
feeder ahead of the others. But I can report that the horses make no  
fuss about their common birthday or the coming of the new year.  
Tonight, like any other, they will be standing, dozing on their feet,  
ears tipping back and forth at the slightest of sounds.

There is something deeply gratifying about joining the horses in their  
pasture a few minutes before the clock strikes 12 on New Year’s Eve.  
What makes the night exceptional, in their eyes and mine, is my  
presence among them, not the lapsing of an old year.

It’s worth standing out in the snow just to savor the anticlimax of  
midnight, just to acknowledge that out of the tens of millions of  
species on this planet, only one bothers to celebrate not the passing  
of time, but the way it has chosen to mark the passing of time. I  
remember the resolutions I made when I was younger. I find myself  
thinking that one way to describe nature is a realm where resolutions  
have no meaning.

It’s not that time isn’t passing or that the night doesn’t show it.  
The stars are wheeling around Polaris, and the sugar maples that frame  
the pasture are laying down another cellular increment in their annual  
rings. The geese stir in the poultry yard. A hemlock sheds its snow.  
No two nights are ever the same.

I always wonder what it would be like to belong to a species — just  
for a while — that isn’t so busy indexing its life, that lives wholly  
within the single long strand of its being. I will never have even an  
idea of what that’s like.

I know because when I stand among the horses tonight, I will feel a  
change once midnight has come. Some need will have vanished, and I  
will walk back to the house — lights burning, smoke coming from the  
wood stove — as if something had been accomplished, some episode closed.

VERLYN KLINKENBORG

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/opinion/31mon3.html?_r=1&oref=slogin