2024 was a difficult year for me, full of disappointments and featuring many surprising and terrible realizations and revelations about others, and about myself.
Perhaps that is why I have a feeling that 2025 is going to be a year of utter destruction and re-building for me.
But I am trying to remain hopeful, so here is my personal New Years’ wish for you, if you happen to be finding yourself in a similar situation:
Two weekends ago, I was surprised to hear from one of my oldest*and dearest friends of mine, M.
Turns out M was slated to be in town for a few days, vending at a local convention.
After a bit of small talk and catching up, M asked me if I would be available to assist with vending, as their assistants inexplicably bailed.
Little did I know that I was in for an intense whirlwind of activity for four straight days.
But the work wasn’t all that difficult, and it was the fact that M needed help…
And I resolved to be there for them.
When they asked me why it was that I would so readily drop everything to ‘be there’ – I explained that it was because M had been that sort of friend to me, once long ago, and I was only doing what I felt was appropriate in response.
You see, M was once my torch in the dark…and I remembered.
‘Worry is simply a misuse of imagination.’
My son and my daughter-in-law sent me what may have been the most appropriate gift:
Two worry stones!
One for each hand.
Because I overthink (read: worry) that much.
So I’m a double-fisted overthinker now…going forward with the misuse of my own imagination.
~~ The Journey~~
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice–
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do–
determined to save
the only life you could save.~
~Mary Oliver
While I am experiencing a fair amount of diggity these days, the next few weeks are promising to bring me an overwhelming surplus of diggity to my life…and that, my friends, is a good thing.*
~~~
*That is, depending upon how one defines ‘diggity‘ – of which I am using in line with the definition of “a state of being or existence, in association with and conveyed by interjections, such as absolutely or definitely”
“I think everyone feels like they personally own, somehow, all the many possibilities inherent in their lives. But I think that only lonely people, or frightened people, really celebrate that fact or enshrine it as the most important fact of all.
I co-own all that I have experienced thus far, and I’ll co-own everything that happens from this point, with someone or many someones.”
I’ve heard it said that everything in life happens in cycles. Sometimes I am comforted by that truth, and other times, I am horrified and despairing of it.
While I don’t know if I would define what’s happening to me as the result of some sort of cycle, I do know that I have been thinking a lot about the facts of my spiritual experiences, and how much they have affected my life and my identity.
And the simplest way I can identify this cycle is to accept that
I learn.
I forget.
I am not a fan of New Year’s Eve. I’ve never been a fan of New Year’s Eve.
So, I was delighted to see such an apt quote on my social media feed today..being the last day of December, the last day of 2017.
Like Sam Shepard, I detest endings….but perhaps it is simply that my perception is faulty.
May 2018 be a worthy beginning for all of us ❤
bloodteethandflame 