the Gate of the Year

On New Year's Day I woke up to an email from someone I don't know, quoting part of a poem I don't know. But I like the verse, and so looked it up and found that it is part of a little-known poem, quoted by King George VI in his Christmas message of 1939.

...I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year,
"Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown."
And he replied, "Go out into the darkness, and put your hand into the hand of God.
That shall be to you better than light, and safer than a known way."

As much as I intended to make the first day of the year one of introspection and visioning for the coming year, I also could not help but acknowledge that we head, as always, full speed in to the darkness, where God alone is a known companion. So I took this verse as a gift on the first day of Twenty Eleven, and offer the picture below. It is of a fence that I found last week at Point Reyes. There were several walk-around gates in the crooked fence. I loved the lines of it, both outlining the seafarer's cemetery it encloses, and pointing to the landscape beyond, the unknown. At the Gate of the Year!