2015: a retrospective.

Dear 2015,

I told myself, and perhaps others, that I would blog every day in the year 2015. I did pretty well--323 posts. It's not quite the high watermark that 2012 was, when I wrote 363 posts. But still.

There were times this year when things felt so sad and hard--not necessarily my own personal things, but things in the larger world. Deaths. Suffering on an intimate and global scale. I wanted to speak to these things, but sometimes the daily post seemed an inadequate container for that speech. So: silence.

I'm sorry for those silences, ultimately.

In a year of so much sorrow, there were also so many miracles, so many joys. Two weddings among my children. A new granddaughter. Visits hither and yon. My best friend and I walked down to the Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde. I swam in the North Sea and climbed a Scottish mountain(/hill). Went to Ireland and saw passage tombs and swans in a river and won a poetry prize. I  held my new book in my hands.

It feels incomprehensible to me sometimes, truly, the ways that sorrow and joy braid and intertwine, but I want to be able to speak to that, that twisted fiber that makes the thread that becomes the fabric that is experience. I want to try to find words for all of it. That's why I want to write, to be a writer: to keep trying to find those words.

This next year, I plan to

• write more
• take excellent care of those I love--the historian especially, and my parents
• cook more

We were talking, my family and I, about resolutions the other night. My daughter said she liked to make a resolution, one that was positive, that had to do with how she treated others with greater care. I loved that. I always think of resolutions in terms of what I want more of--more creativity, more joy. Maybe more dancing. That would be an excellent resolution.

Thank you, my dear readers, for reading and talking back to me. I treasure the conversation.

love,

htms