Throwing the pants in the fire
Thoughts for the end of 2023
On the afternoon of the Solstice, my friend Christina sent a text: anyone want to come over tonight, burn anything you’d like to let go of, and call in the light of the new year?
My answer was duh, of course, so a few of us went over and sat by her outdoor fireplace wrapped in blankets, drinking tea and eating clementines, and writing things down on scraps of paper to toss into the flames. It was lovely and quiet, a ritual I’ve done many times on new moons and full moons and solstices and random Tuesday nights when I just want to clear some shit.
It was late, the part of the evening where everyone was standing around and collecting mugs and blankets after saying “well, I think we’re gonna head out” but before actually heading out, when a guy walked into the backyard carrying two giant Amazon boxes. “Is it too late to burn stuff?”
The hosts said no, it wasn’t too late to burn stuff. And I do mean stuff. We all sat back down. The guy’s name was Sean, and one by one, he pulled things out of the boxes: a gigantic stack of health insurance paperwork. Medical records. A big mind map poster of ideas and projects that now felt outdated and limiting. We listened as he explained the story behind each thing before dropping it into the fire. Photos of someone important who’d lived through something terrible. Prayer flags. A macramé bracelet given to him by Ram Dass. “I realized, why do I need all these signifiers of spirituality when I can just be spiritual?”
A tiny Spanish dictionary.
A pocket mandolin.
A well-loved pair of patchwork pants, worn to many festivals by a version of himself who doesn’t exist anymore.
We weren’t sure the pants would burn at first, but as the flames took them, he pulled out a guitar and played: a combination of Bjork, something else I can’t remember, and a song he wrote for a friend, quickly and urgently, as they were dying. Sean was a musician, it turned out, a very good one.
We stood in a circle, quiet, listening, watching the flames and the ash floating up into the black night, like our earliest ancestors did on the darkest night of the year except for the festival pants part.
I don’t know what anybody else was thinking about, but I was thinking about the long sequence of unknowable things that had to happen in order to find myself standing there in that circle. And about having a whole house full of things to burn.