January has never been my favorite month. It’s cold, the holiday bills start rolling in, and worst of all, I can barely find a floor mat at the gym I didn’t want to go to in the first place.

“New Year’s resolutions,” I grumped to my daughter.

What’s wrong with those?” she asked, yoga mat in hand.

I didn’t want to derail a healthy new habit before the lotus position got its first January bloom, but I couldn’t stop myself.

“I just don’t think they work,” I said. “Why do people start the year drawing up a list of things they really hate to do, so they can feel guilty in 15 days when they’re into the Haagen- Dazs and off the wagon?”

Patient person that she is, she gave me a hug, stopped to clean up the kale and apple smoothie she’d whipped up in the Vitamix, and headed off to the yoga studio.

“Do what pleases you,” she said on her way out the door.

I could not argue with her advice because I had already decided to follow it the week before when I had a random encounter with Emily Dickinson in an Arizona gift shop. I had hardly expected to run into the New England poet there, among the salt shakers that look like jalapeno peppers. But there she was, in the form of a vintage postcard written in a wispy hand, comparing hope to a bird.

Of course, being Emily, she did not directly compare hope to a bird. She went at it with a sideways glance, making me work a little to keep up and in the process feel the rhythm of the concept and possibly the heartbeat of the creature.

For the curious, I will repeat the verse in question here. Confirmed poetry-haters may skip to the next paragraph. Hope is a feathered thing, That perches in the soul, And sings the tune – without the words, And never stops at all.

Reading the verse several times over and loving it even more than the inflated $3.95 that I paid for it, I had a sort of New Year’s epiphany. If I resolved to do something I actually love in 2010, I would probably keep the resolution and lose the guilt.

I resolved, right there by the jalapeno shakers, to read more poetry just because I want to. I’m starting with Emily Dickinson, Billy Collins, Ted Kooser, and Julia B. Levine.

So far, I feel compelled to report, my want-to resolution is working. Right off, in fact, it took a giant leap in a magical one-thing-leads-to-another way. The featured book at my local used book store extolled the virtues of living life “with heightened awareness” like a poet, and I began to suspect I’d stumbled onto something greater than one “feathered thing.” (Apologies to those who skipped the poem).

I have not, of course, completely given up on the idea of going to the gym. I will just not be going in any formally resolute way.

I plan to return at least by early February. I am sure there will be plenty of floor mats to go around by then.

Copyright 2010 Pat Snyder