Shoots of new possibilities

You know what it is before you open the parcel. You have a number of nieces and nephews, and for the past 12 years one or the other of them have sent you the same present.

Sure enough, it’s a calendar, featuring a handdrawn laminated picture. This year the drawing is by one of your nephews, whose wobbly signature stands beside the grand title ‘‘Artist’’. At the centre of the drawing is a huge tree, made of geometric shapes in orange, green and black.

You already have five new calendars in your house, ready for the New Year. You have Swiss Alps in the kitchen, a New Zealand glacier in the bathroom, English lakes in your office, Swedish archipelagos in the living room, and (your secret favourite) sweetly kitsch oversized kittens in your bedroom so the first thing you’ll see for the next 365 days will be monstrous, furry faces.

As there are only five rooms in your flat, it’s not immediately clear where to hang the Bauhaus tree. So you put it on the table, beside the Vanity Fairs and the Vogues and the piles of papers. And because you sit here every day, you look at the calendar with greater attention than you would were it hanging on the wall. Every morning between Christmas and New Year you look at your nephew’s methodically drawn forest – vast tree in the centre, smaller trees clustered around it – and you think about what he’s drawn, and why.

Children tend to draw pictures at a cracking pace, with an assertion and confidence at which adults can only marvel. You’ve watched your niece draw an elaborate seascape in three minutes flat: Rapidly changing the colour of the sun from gold to pink, decisively adding a boat to the horizon, obliterating an unsatisfactory mermaid with one dark stormy stroke of the pen.

Earlier this year you went to a Yoko Ono exhibition where gallery-goers were invited to contribute their own drawings. You noticed the difficulty adults had in transposing their ideas into images, and the struggle they had letting go of their inhibitions. Most frowned with concentration for minutes on end before finally sketching a few restrained lines on a small piece of paper.

It seems likely that your nephew has recently been on a trip to a typical New Zealand plantation. To the left of his bold orange-and-green tree are a number of tree stumps, standing on a dull grey background. But on the right are some vigorous unfelled saplings, springing in vivid green from equally green earth.

An acquaintance of yours has just returned from the Peruvian jungle, where she participated in an ayahuasca ritual – voluntarily imbibing a herbal elixir and suffering hours of hallucinations and vomiting, to reach a supposedly higher state of being. ‘‘I saw backwards and forwards at the same time,’’ she enthused. ‘‘I saw the past and future with extreme clarity.’’

In fact, when you look at your nephew’s picture each morning, you also start seeing backwards and forwards simultaneously. The truncated tree stumps come to represent the dying year for you: Days brought to their necessary end, dreams not yet achieved. But around the stumps, sprouting from the grey soil, there are a few patches of new growth that you hadn’t noticed on a first or second look.

And, as 2013 draws closer, the vivid pencil trees standing proud and tall on the right of the drawing give you the same sense of anticipation as the approach of each new year. Any day now you’ll be stepping into an uncharted forest of possibility, with lime-green hopes stretching high towards a papery sky.