what the new year holds

Today marks the beginning of a new year, and with that, new resolutions to be or to do things differently. I used to have a bad habit of starting new blogs with new years, eventually finding myself spread so thin over a handful of platforms that all of them suffered. To begin this year well, I've spent the day cleaning. I cleared out my closet, waxed my kitchen counter, took two loads down to the recycle bin...and deleted each blog but this one. A last bastion, if you will.

Anyone who's been paying attention has noticed that I haven't posted in four months, and before that it had been spotty for quite a while. I've used my blogs in part to simply have an outward voice for the things that are going on in my life, but also to clarify thoughts, experiences, and hopes related to living a creative life in community. I'd like to continue with that, but I'm not really sure what it will look like.

I hesitate to set out a grand plan for this blog and this year, because I don't believe most of my new year's resolutions anymore. They generally have to do with developing certain habits, rhythms, even rituals, and I am terrible at anything habitual unless it involves sleep. That's a characteristic I've always wanted for my life in an idealistic way, but which in the real day-to-day of life is completely contrary to my personality.

So I make no promises. I can only say that I have had a wonderful year of developing creatively, of developing relationships with creative people, with pursuing remarkable and inspiring avenues of community—and I suspect 2015 will carry with it even more of these opportunities. I will do my best to record them here with better attentiveness. We'll see how that goes.

In the meantime, may this year be one in which we begin to believe that change is possible.

Comments

window in the sub

Dear Nathaniel, I am microwaving pie that Mom bought up in Oak Glen this week on her way home from the orthodontist. As I put it in the microwave, I was full of sadness that I was not in Oak Glen with her. Why did I not go? I was working. I want to see the trees turn. I want to wander slowly through autumnal gift shops. Under the water, you cannot sense the approach of the seasons. Even here it is difficult because, after all, it's California. But I can still sense it. After three seasons in Illinois and one in Scotland, it must be with me for good. Or at least for a while. Because I am all abuzz with eagerness for fall and winter, for turkeys and dried leaves and Santa. I should start cooking again this fall. Fall foods are my favorite. Baked squash dripping with melted butter and brown sugar, pumpkin soup... this year, if I have enough money, I will put together a holiday dinner for my friends. And we will drink Scandinavian mulled wine, which is the most wonderful thing I have e...

Again in Gilead

I just finished reading this for the second time last week, thanks to the forever book group of Grace. It was equally as lovely the second time around, and while reading it, I wrote down a dozen more quotes from the incomparable Ames, who is both too beautiful a man to be real and too beautiful a man not to be real. (I'm grateful and amazed to know a few like him.) "It has been my experience that guilt can burst through the smallest breach and cover the landscape, and abide in it in pools and danknesses, just as native as water." (p.82) I have found this to be remarkably true. I see it in myself, and in many others as well. "I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect." (p.91) This seems to be about the only way I experience visions, but because memory is a rickety thing, I tend not to trust them much. Which makes me a poor prophet. "I know, too, that my own experience of the church has been, in many senses, shelte...

Being a Baker

Working at the Main Library has surprising advantages. Just now I stepped out of my office, walked five paces across the hall, scanned a badge, and walked under the civic center plaza to the elevator that stretches from beneath the earth up to the mayor’s office on the fourteenth floor. I didn’t have so far to go—just up one level to the utilities counter, where a sympathetic, amused woman named Sue shut down my gas payments. It took less than five minutes. I finished packing up my kitchen days ago. My cake pans were in boxes sometime early last week. But as I walked through the underground loading dock on my way back to the office, I was distinctly aware of the finality of what I’d just done. I would never, from that moment on, be able to bake for anyone out of that kitchen. Maybe it doesn’t seem like a very big deal, but I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of a certain identity, namely being “the person who bakes a lot”. I made a tiered wedding cake for some friends (because...

A Single Layer

Search This Blog