Maria Donovan

This is my last photo for December: a timely goodbye to 2023, and my offering for Bushboy’s Last on the Card photo challenge.

My last photo was taken between Christmas and New Year from a back window. We’ve had so much rain here I was excited to see red sky at sunset! The clouds had a wild painterly quality and knowing the effect wouldn’t last long I was glad to get any kind of photo with my phone camera. 

New Year is the third mass experience marking for me the turning of the year, following on from the Solstice and Christmas Day; it’s as if I need telling three times before it sinks in.

The Solstice makes perfect sense, never more clearly than when I lived in Wales, near Aberystwyth, 1000 feet up, and observed the sunset moving along the sea horizon every evening from one fixed point to another and back again.

Christmas – whatever you think of it, it can be hard to avoid!  

But New Year is something else: calendar dates are strange and it gives me a funny feeling to know that with a tick of the clock, 2023 is no longer part of the present. It is now just another of the years that belong to the book of the past. 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about moments: how each one is significant in its own way and never to be relived. Time seems to speed up as I get older; maybe because most physical tasks are taking longer, maybe because the whirl of years is making me giddy.

However you feel about the passing of the Old Year and the Welcoming of the New, if you want to take part in Brian’s inclusive photo-challenge please check the link above for the simple what to dos.

If you share my fascination with the calendar and the ways in which we count time, have a look at this post about January and Janus: the god with two faces, one looking back, the other ahead; also the god of archways and doors.

However you navigate time, I wish you all peace, happiness and good health from moment to moment.