A New Year Greeting

Dear friends,
I am grateful for having gathered with so many of you this summer under our tent. Artists and audiences together, we made that tent a theatre: a shared space to gather and imagine other lives–simultaneously like our own and not like our own. That shared imagining was a great joy. Your faith in our work sustained us; I hope we helped to sustain you, too.

Even as we look back at this year, we look forward to the year ahead, a year full of questions, and of hopes. We are making plans to come together again–in the Chester Town Hall if possible, wherever we can if necessary.

As we step into a year still full of uncertainty, I want to share with you this beautiful poem by W.S. Merwin, written directly to the New Year itself. In it he offers us the stilled hush of a new morning, the acceptance of our partial knowledge, and the possibility of our hopes.

To the New Year

With what stillness at last
you appear in the valley
your first sunlight reaching down
to touch the tips of a few
high leaves that do not stir
as though they had not noticed
and did not know you at all
then the voice of a dove calls
from far away in itself
to the hush of the morning
so this is the sound of you
here and now whether or not
anyone hears it this is
where we have come with our age
our knowledge such as it is
and our hopes such as they are
invisible before us
untouched and still possible

Thank you again for all you make possible. We will see you in the new year.

Warmly,