A LOT

This moment has nothing to do with the last one unless you choose the past to continue.

~ Alan Cohen

Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true.

~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I’m safely back at home! After a two day journey (1200 mile road trip), and almost all six of us coming down with and recuperating from a nasty head cold virus, I am now here in my beloved writing nook, well rested enough to write my last blog post of 2022. I, for one, am not sad about 2022 soon to be in the rearview mirror. This year has been A LOT. In that mix of “A LOT” were plenty of good times and celebrations, graduations, trips and revelry, but there were also difficult losses, and vivid fears to deal with in the ways of weather (it was a busy little hurricane season this year), and with loved ones’ deadly illnesses. I’m ready to safely disembark from this steely, high thrills roller coaster of 2022, and maybe instead, get on the ferris wheel and just chill and relax and calmly enjoy the views and vistas for a little while, without getting my stomach all tied up in knots. How about you? How are you feeling about this upcoming year?

This will be a quiet New Year’s Eve for us, and I’m comfortable with that fact. I haven’t had enough time to reflect on what I want to bring into the new year with me, and what I would like to discard. I imagine that we’ll sit in front of the fire and quietly muse on these thoughts, and then maybe even wish on a star or two.

No matter how we have arrived to this day – harried, or happy, or something in between, we did it! We have achieved yet another year under our belts, and all of the joys and the challenges and the growth that 2022 brought to us, and so now, we are all equipped for leveling up tomorrow. Ready or not 2023, here we come!!! Here we come.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Soul Sunday

The New Year lies before you
Like a spotless tract of snow
Be careful how you tread on it
For every mark will show.

Good morning. My regular readers know that Sundays are dedicated to poetry. Poetry is emotion in free form. We think of poetry in just written form, but honestly how we live our lives is a form of poetry, unique to each of us. Today, I choose not to write a poem of my own, but I did some exploring on the internet to find New Year’s poems that spoke to me. I have published them here. Please feel free to share your favorite poems, written by you or others in my Comments section. Have a blessed, easy, dreamy day before we enter the first full week of 2021.

To the New Year

BY W. S. MERWIN

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

Burning the Old Year

BY NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.

Smiley

Yesterday, my daughter and I picked up some takeout for dinner, and the young man who came to the car with our food, was a walking smile. He was what jubilation looks like in human form. Though wearing a mask, his eyes glittered when he talked, and the wide smile that must been on his face, was easy to picture behind the mask. When he walked to the car, it was more of a float/bounce.

“Let me ask you something,” I said. “Are you always this happy and joyful?”

“Oh, yes ma’am,” he said, without any hesitation, but perhaps with a tinge of “aw shucks” sheepishness. “My manager calls me ‘Smiley’.”

“Don’t ever let anything change that about you. It’s delightful. Your energy is wonderful,” I told him. (I love that I’ve reached the age that I can say things like that with some guise of wisdom and authority and knowingness. I like to think that I come off like a sage – ha!)

The blissful boy just smiled some more, and bounced on to the next car. My daughter turned to me and said, “That was nice of you to compliment him, Mom. I could tell that he liked that. Men don’t get complimented as much as we do. I’ve read that they relish in compliments longer, and really enjoy them.”

“Wow,” I said. “I love to compliment people. I get as much joy from their reaction as they get from the compliment. I am never dishonest, though. I only compliment what I truly like, and notice, and appreciate about something special and unique about a particular person. Maybe we women should relish in our compliments, too. Maybe we women should really enjoy and believe what the kind person who gave us the compliment had to say, and just soak it in, and marinate in it, all day long.”

Readers, let’s do that in 2021. Let’s make one of our resolutions to believe the nice things that people have to say about us. Let’s make one of our resolutions to notice and relish and appreciate and acknowledge the wonderful qualities of other people and of ourselves, and to say these things out loud. Let’s “glow up” in 2021 and let’s help others to “glow up”, too.

Happy New Year’s Eve, my friends and readers. We’ve reached the last day of a shocking and treacherous year. That makes us strong, resilient, optimistic, hopeful, resourceful, adaptable, and supportive people. You are strong, resilient, optimistic, hopeful, resourceful, adaptable and supportive, and I love that about you. Thank you for being a stable force in my life, and making a positive difference in it. Enjoy the evening!!! Glow up!!!