Endbeginnings....

Here we are, Day 4 of the 12 Days of Christmas, midweek between the birth of a child and the birth of a new year. I am writing this on Day One, struck by the overlap of year’s end and the new beginning that Christmas signifies, feeling the tug between them.

I’ve borrowed "Endbeginnings" from a gifted writer and oncologist/therapist, Rachel Naomi Remen. Her book Kitchen Table Wisdom (1996) is one that any cancer survivor or cancer endurer would appreciate because it sheds so much light on life in its midst. She crafted the word to describe her dawning awareness that endings and beginnings are mutually dependent, that "there is no ending without a beginning."

"For a long time I never noticed the beginnings," she says, launching a story that might have looked like the end of something except for a change of heart and mind. I think the same could be said of the Christmas story, which can be seen as a beginning only in retrospect. The stars and angels knew and spread the word, but it would be a long time before the baby’s birth began changing the world.

And I’m sure it looked like an ending to Herod the Great, which it turned out to be, but only after his fearful response rained terror on the heads of his people. "People never give up power without a fight," says my attorney friend Richard Harriman, who has spent the last 30 years working to see the laws of the land reflected in this valley’s landscape. He has more experience with people’s reactions when they have to give up power than most of us would want.

I think we can look at the conflict in Lindsay as an endbeginning. Pam Kimball’s 875-word guest commentary last week bore all the marks of someone struggling to keep a sinking ship upright. See all the good we’ve done she wheedled, blaming the finger pointers "who have done very little over the years to help" for interfering with the progress they’re making under new management. "(W)ith a little less criticism and a little more help, the effort to improve lives and expand options here in Lindsay can continue," she ended, hoping for a happier New Year.

What she’s trying to dismiss is a huge thing, an awakening of people to the misuse of this community’s resources on wasteful projects with enormous price tags, both past and present, to the detriment of the average citizen. There is also an awakening - and a flexing of the hope muscle - about our abilities to change that. What she finds irritating and unpleasant is actually a tremendous sign of life in what were previously dead limbs, like when a paralyzed leg begins to function again.

The citizens of this town are waking up and starting to move, getting some coordination back after being out of commission for so long. It is a beginning, which requires an end. It is an endbeginning.