Tag Archives: “new year”

Two small not-resolutions

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Paris Collage Collective prompt response

Do I need to lose weight? Yes. Add cardio to my weekly routines? Yes? Eat less sugar, reach out to friends more, read more? Yes, yes, and yes.

Not going there at the moment! This year I’ve landed on two discrete areas of learning — so discrete that I’m confident I can follow through. Are you ready?

Countries in Africa. It’s time I knew them and where they were.

I’ll be printing out this blank map as an aid.

Dog breeds. I don’t know why, I just want to be more conversant in the many types of dogs out there. This week: Brussels Griffon.

What can you commit to in the new year?

Paris Collage Collective collage for this week

We are all, I imagine, spooked about what lies ahead in this pivotal year. When I woke this morning and heard “2024” in my head, I felt a distinct sense of dread. Ugh. Elections. So, in the realm of grounded optimism, I’ll be:

* continuing with my weekly “Seven Sisters” half-hour phone call;

* and with the same friends, continuing to show up for our monthly Healing Circle (with anti-racism focus);

* and writing POSTCARDS TO VOTERS. I topped 1,000 cards this past year (over several years, that is). I plan to write several hundred more in 2024 and to make it less tedious, to host a couple of parties. Sitting with two others at a table of pens and stamps and addresses is actually fun.

For the next little while, by way of annual review I’ll be scrolling through my photos and sharing some of 2023. Here are a couple of screenshots to start.

PS if you get the Boston Globe, be sure to read Dave Barry’s year-in-review in Sunday’s magazine section. He is so, so funny.

Snow spiraling down

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 It’s been a while since I photographed my plaster figures. They seem to be miffed at each other. Snow traces delicate spirals through my fields of vision. It doesn’t seem noncommittal so much as full of import – as if there is something in their downward spiral to be decoded if only I knew how.

Finn and I had a long walk before it started. Now he has his bone and I have my laptop and we both have the fire.

A very nice first Monday.

Crescent of light

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It is bitterly cold today. Cops tend a downed wire at the corner. Gusts of wind are taking branches down and forcing kids on the playground to wear hats. Finn and I take brisk but short walks around the neighborhood. All of a sudden it is a new year.

2015/01/img_7203.jpgThe light is different already. I noticed it on the buildings near the airport this morning. I noticed it on this Chinese plate this afternoon. Less wan and with a little more warmth.
light-chinese-plate-deemallonI don’t seem to know what I am doing anymore. Or maybe transitions throw me more than they used to. Back to the empty nest, which now includes Finn so it’s a lot less empty, but still….

Here is a rambling list of hopes/intentions for the new year — only things on my mind at the moment, and not an attempt at comprehensive breadth or corrective sway:  I hope to make a blanket for one of the boys this year. And then for the other next year. They have twin sized quilts but it’s time for doubles. I would like to read a little more this year. Walk a lot more. Let more stuff roll off my back, even if it means letting go of reactive anger and feeling more sadness. I plan to learn how to sharpen knives in 2015. And, I am going to get rid of a lot more shit.  A lot more. (It continues to amaze me how satisfying this decluttering process is!) Better blogging – especially, reading favorites — I HOPE so. Progress on the writing front — I HOPE so.  Continued health of my loved ones — I chant daily.

2015/01/img_7207.jpgAnd now I’ll leave you with a double image that serves as a visual prayer from me to you for the New Year — may you have more abundance, joy, ease!

PS  Finn ate the Nine of Cups this morning.  Thankfully, I have a spare deck which now will only serve to supply replacement cards, though of course the full deck is boxed and out of reach now!

peace

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Peace to All!

Everyone being home and the absence of schedule and a head-achey tiredness have suspended time in a peculiar but needed way… shouldn’t the darkest days of the year contain a bit of quiet?  I made a most delicious soup today (with chorizo and beef stock made yesterday by simmering vegetable scraps with ox tails).  Read and read, with and without the heating pad.  Steps outside to give Jack the needed business breaks.  Not much else.

Read two books since Christmas – “Nightwoods” by Charles Frazier, and “The Sense of An Ending” by Julian Barnes.  Both well worth the time.  Plus, I’m creeping through Joseph Ellis’s “American Creation”, Eliza Pinckney’s letters, and a book about fashion in colonial America.  Getting a picture of a distant time, added to by re-watching the first in the John Adams series on HBO.

It feels good to be quiet.  And to not run around.

And even swathed in quiet, I managed to complete Schedule C today – about six weeks earlier than usual because financial aid forms will be due in a few days.

What I have not managed to do, is reflect back on the year and ask the usual questions – that is, what would I like to let go of?  What would I like to invite?  The thing I MOST wanted to let go of — my 9 to 5 job – is already gone, and there’s not been a single day since September when I haven’t bumped into profound gratitude about that.  I wish I was a more patient person… but there probably aren’t enough drugs in the world to make that transformation happen (my running friend would counter, “exercise, Dee, exercise”).  So there’s that.

If anything of interest pops up in terms of framing artistic endeavor for the New Year, you will be the first to know!  I do know that I want to draw and write more.  Maybe that’s enough.  “I want to draw and write more”.  Right now the whole idea of finding some edge to articulate a commitment toward feels like way more work than I’ve got it in me to do.  I hope that’s the bug speaking.

… still wishing for snow.

A picture from two weeks ago.

Happy New Year to all!