Gratitude List:
1.  Mist rising through moonlight in the hollow.
2.  Driving up the ridge in the bright sun this morning and into a cloud that seemed caught in the trees of the ridgeline.  Fog all around, and bright sun, caught in a pocket of brightness.
3.  New spaces.
4.  My Side of the Mountain.  My eldest started to fill a backpack today.  He said he was going to go off for a couple of days.  Could I make him a thermos of medicine tea?  Could I show him where in his survival manual he could find the pages on building a shelter, please?  Could he take the pruners?  I remembered in time that we had listened to the audio book of My Side of the Mountain back in September, and it included a section of the author telling of her own childhood adventures and how important it was for her parents to BELIEVE her, to let her go explore, to not squelch the intent.  The task for my own child was a little too daunting on a winter day, when all was said and done, but he did spend hours outside by himself, plotting his personal shelter.  My heart is so full of this.
5.  John Cope’s Dried Corn

May we walk in Beauty.

Two days ago, my husband Farmer Jon and I went through all the non-children’s books in the house.  We now have all the boxes out of the attic, and all the books we are keeping are on shelves or otherwise accounted for.  He took a box to the Historical Society, and we have four more full boxes headed to the library sale.  I think we managed to rid ourselves of about 20 linear feet of books.

Still, the shelves look full.  Oh, and it was difficult work.  Some of the choices were painful.  I am giving away some James Joyce, some Madeleine L’Engle.  But my brain is so much freer.  The voices clamoring in my head for my attention are so much more manageable.

In the meantime, I have discovered some books that I want to read pretty soon.  Already on my stack of current reading was Judy Cannato’s Field of Compassion and Renee Peterson Trudeau’s Nurturing the Soul of Your Family.  I had Mary Oliver’s Owls and Fantasies: Poems and Essays on the stack, too, and my former (and forever) college professor Jay B. Landis’ Verse Assignments.  Now, after The Great Book Purge, I also have Arundati Roy’s An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, Rudolf Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul and his Prayers for Children, and Edith Pargeter’s (Ellis Peters’) Brothers of Gwynedd Quartet, and Ervin Schlabach’s From Switzerland to America: The Story of the Schlabachs.  Yeah, I know, that’s a lot of hope for my reading potential, but some of that is just dipping in my literary toes while others are for deep water swimming.

Part of the impetus for The Great Book Sifting came from Trudeau’s book on nurturing the family.  My friend Coleen suggested we read it together, chapter by chapter, and talk about it as we go.  The first chapter is about self-care as a basic principle for parents.  If we cannot take care of our own selves, Trudeau suggests, we become reactive in our parenting instead of responding in the moment, we take our children’s behavior personally rather than seeing their innocence, we make mountains out of molehills, miss the really good stuff, lose compassion, and expect too much of them. So I am committing to self-care.  And for me that does not mean an extra bubble bath every week.  That means, at least at first, freeing myself from the “stuff management,” getting rid of what I do not need.  This weekend, the big-people books.  Tomorrow, the children’s books.  Next weekend, the kitchen.  And already, I am feeling my brain clearing.

Oh, and I did actually get a new book in the mail this week, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, translated by Johanna Macy & Anita Barrows.  Here’s the first poem:

“The hour is striking so close above me,
so clear and sharp,
that all my senses ring with it.
I feel it now: there’s a power in me
to grasp and give shape to my world.

I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All my becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
and they come toward me, to meet and be met.”

Gratitude List:
1.  Wassail.  White toast, brown ale, and a bowl of the white maple tree. Awakening the spirits of the fruit trees.  The sap will rise, the buds will swell, the flowers will burst forth in their season.  May there be bees.  Oh Holy Mystery, may there be bees!
2.  Good conversation.  Hard and powerful and awakening questions.  Friends who are willing to ask and listen, and expand and refine ideas.
3.  Morning and sunrise.  Awakening to a new day with the snuggly people in my house.
4.  The dreamtime of early winter gives way to the awakening of late winter.  Seasons change and shift.  We keep whirling ’round that star, in tandem with that ball of rock, our moon.  Light and darkness, cold and heat, the angle of light, the movement of birds and beasts through air and over earth.
5.  Awakening to new possibilities, new hopes, new projects, new endeavors.

May we walk in Beauty.

A sunflower.  Just because.  No, there aren’t any out there in the snow.

I realize that I am a little late on the whole New Year thing.  It’s all just time, you know?

We have these regular big events in the cosmos–Solstices, Equinoxes, Lunar cycles, star shifts–and we parse our time in smaller parcels between, counting and marking cycles of days to give meaning to the patterns.  I love observing the changes through those big and little rhythms, feeling my body respond to the shift of season, eating the foods the earth provides in her cycles.

In my part of the world, we make Resolutions, silly and serious.  We make fun of ourselves for doing it; we get earnest and hopeful and empowered to make change; we rail against the practice as fluffy and cheap.  I, for one, like the idea of making Resolutions, of challenging ourselves to strive, to be better people, to openly state our aims in order to support each other in our desires.  I know people like to make a strong distinction between the two, but I really think it’s very similar to the practice of setting Intentions, openly stating what we want to manifest in our lives in the coming year.

One of the pitfalls of this thinking, however, is that the necessary self-examination for setting resolutions and intentions so often begins with a sense of inadequacy or lack that is very akin to shame.  I’m too fat, I’m too lazy, I’m too disorganized, I’m too mean, I’m not right, I’m not adequate, I’m not sufficient.  And when I start there, I get stuck in the–excuse me–pig shit wallow of self-loathing, and the paltry attempts that I make to better myself seem impossible.  The blue sky is too far away.  And I sort of enjoy it here, really.

But if I say that the process is too demoralizing and demeaning, and refuse to do it just because I might get stuck in the smelly place, then I never reach and strive, and the whole business of reaching and striving to be better is such a gloriously Human Ideal.  I do want to be better.  I just don’t want to start with the pig wallow.

And so, instead of saying, “I’m too fat,” I’ll recognize my sense of a need for change in my body, and fill my self with this Resolve: “I will to feed my body tasty healthy food and give it the gift of endorphin-releasing movement.”  (Yeah, okay, haha, but REALLY!)  Instead of playing that scratchy old tape of “I’m a disorganized messy person,” I am going to offer myself the Intention of “I am going to free my life of the clutter in order to free myself to live more fully with my family in the present moment, to free my mind to create and complete fulfilling work.”  Instead of cringing, “I’m too mean,” I am going to give myself the gift of breathing through the tense and frustrating moments.

Mostly, I Resolve and Intend to Write.  Write often, write more, write good stuff, write junk.  That one worked really well for me last year.  I’m going to see if I can surf that wave into this year, too.

I like to listen to my dreams, to bring into my waking life the words and images that appear on the slate of my unconscious in the night, especially during Twelvenight, the period between Christmas and Epiphany, those twelve days that catch up the 354-day Lunar Cycle with the 366ish-day Solar Cycle.  Time out of time.  A human construct, to be sure, and perhaps a little silly–we don’t know what to do with those days that mess up our sense of order, so we tuck them in there at the end of the year, and call them special.  They feel more holy, more hushed, than the others, like a pause, a quietness.  To me, at least.

I have been sleeping deeply lately, which is its own kind of wintertime blessing, and I don’t want to disturb that.  The clearest thing that came out of my dreaming this year was the word Bridge.  This will be my word for the year.  There are so many questions to ask myself with that one.

And, last of the New Year Ramble, I invoke Ganesha.  He’s the elephant-headed god of the Hindu pantheon.  He’s joyful and twinkly and full of compassion and good humor.  He’s the Remover of Obstacles.  That’s some energy I want to latch onto.

Gratitude List:
1.  Marvel and Wonder
2.  Resolve and Intention
3.  Powerful Dreaming
4.  Removing Obstacles
5.  Misty mornings

May we walk in Beauty.