Good Morning, 2013!  Such a fresh-looking number, that.  I love the movement into a new year, no matter how arbitrary the choice of day may actually be.  As my friend Carol said, Let each day be a new beginning, a chance to begin afresh.  Now, this moment, I am a new person.  And now, in this moment, too, I begin anew.  Always.  There’s that phrase again: Always we begin again.

I went to sleep last night asking for a Word to come to me, a word that would be my focus word for 2013.  What with all the restlessness of a recovering-from-flu six-year-old next to me, and the aches and pains in my own muscles, my sleep was disturbed enough that my dreams haven’t given me clarity on a word.  So I suppose I have to do some actual work on this one.  I think I am going to go with the word I chose for my journal last year.  Perhaps it was unofficially last year’s Word of the Year, but I want to bring in into this year with focus: Palimpsest.

It’s the term for an old manuscript or scroll (usually made of velum) in which the words have been scraped off so that it may be re-written again.  In many cases, remnants of the original documents show through.  I think it was Margaret Atwood who expanded the meaning when she described Canadian cities as palimpsests, new places in which hints and pieces of the older times could be seen.

So Palimpsest is my Word for 2013.  Writing the new chapters of me, I will also read the ways in which the past and memory continue to live in the present, becoming part of the current writing of my life.  Layers upon layers.

I had intended to avoid New Year’s Resolutions this year, but it feels appropriate to me, in conjunction with the word I have chosen, to continue to resolve to scrape away the bits of the story which I no longer need.  So I will continue to resolve, and strengthen my resolve, to de-clutter.  To clean up the spaces in my home and my head which hold the unnecessary bits.  But whatever I miss in my scraping away, instead of resenting, I will look at with wonder at the way it shines a light from the past into the present.

Oh–so Palimpsest will also become today’s poetry prompt.  Anyone care to join me on this one?  I’ll post before I go to bed tonight.