Anyway. I’ve been feeling kind of out of control and it’s a terrible feeling. This is probably exacerbated by the fact that I have zero control over the difficult thing in the center of my life (and it will be in the center, until June). Still, that doesn’t mean I have to throw the baby out with the bath water and lose all sense of control! I don’t have to eat like I’m going to the chair, I don’t have to give up on self-care, I don’t have to revert to slovenliness and time-wasting. And yet I have. My dad was an alcoholic, and early on, when I was very little, I had the sense that every night he swore the next day was going to be different, and he went to bed filled with self-recrimination and hatred, and the next day he thought it was going to be different until the moment it wasn’t, and then all bets were off. It was already ruined for the day. I don’t have to deal with alcoholism, thankfully, but I think I share that tendency, the all-or-nothing, the end-of-day recrimination and vowing that tomorrow will be different.

I was thinking about how much it helped me curb my overindulgence of the internet to give it some big fancy name, “digital sabbatical.” That made it a project, somehow, a Real Thing. I’ve also been thinking about 40 days, the mysterious weight given to that number by religions (I once had a migraine for 40 days and 40 nights, and was hospitalized, and the whole damn thing felt mighty Biblical, I’m telling you!). I grew up in an Old Testament fundamentalist church and read the Bible cover to cover more times than I can remember, and 40 is a weighty number. All the linked references are to a Catholic Bible, which is not the one I’m used to but I found the list already assembled and just lifted it for this post:

• 40 days of the great flood. [Genesis 7:4 , 12 , 17 ,8:6 ]
• 40 days Moses was on the mountain to receive the Law of the Sinai Covenant [Exodus 24:18 ]
• 40 days the children of Israel were tested while Moses was on the mountain
• 40 days Moses was on the mountain after the golden calf. [Exodus 34:28 ]
• 40 days of Jonah in the Assyrian city of Nineveh [Jonah 3:4 ]
• 40 days Ezekiel lay on his right side to symbolize the 40 years of Judah’s transgression [Ezekiel 29:11 ]
• 40 days Jesus fasted in the wilderness before his trial of temptation by Satan [Matthew 4:2 ; Mark 1:13 ; Luke 4:2 ]
• 40 days Jesus taught His disciples after the Resurrection. On the fortieth day He ascended to the Father. [Acts 1:3 ]
• 40 years was the age of Isaac when he married Rebekah [Genesis 25:20 ]
• 40 years from the first Pentecost at Sinai to the taking of the Promised land [Joshua 5:6 ]
• 40 years from the Resurrection to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70AD
• 40 years of Moses in Egypt (by Jewish Tradition)
• 40 years of Moses in Midian before his return to Egypt
• 40 years Israel ate manna [Exodus 16:35 ; Deuteronomy 29:5 ]
• 40 years was Joshua’s age when Moses sent him to reconnoiter on Canaan [Joshua 14:7 ]
• 40 years Eli judged Israel [1 Samuel 4:18 ]
• 40 years of war between Israel and the Philistines
• 40 years of David as King [2 Samuel 5:5 ; 1 Chronicles 29:26-27 ]
• 40 years of Solomon as King [2 Chronicles 9:30

Many eastern churches have forty windows in the circumference of their domes, to show that the domes represent the everlasting heavens. The Jews reckoned that if you fast forty days, you’ve fasted long enough to atone for all your sins; forty days of rain is enough to wipe out everything on Earth. Forty is a powerful number, and often associated with purification.

So I’ve decided to launch a 40-days project for myself. I need to work out the details, I’ll do that on Saturday, so I’ll start this coming Sunday, February 12, and will end 40 days later, Thursday, March 22. I know I’ll address eating and exercising and thinking and writing and creating, and I know I’ll start gently rather than with a huge all-or-nothing bang. There may well be 40-day purification projects out there, and a bit of googling might give me an endless list, but I want to figure out my own. I’ll share the project as I go, and I’ll try to share a week’s slate in advance in case any of it is of interest to you. I can do anything for 40 days, right? It’s long enough not to be easy, but short enough to be endurable, and at the end, I’ll be different somehow.

In preparation for thinking about this project, I put together the following set of most basic lists:

WHAT GOES IN:

• food
• drink
• air
• conversation
• information
• entertainment
• inspiration

WHAT GOES OUT:

• words
• actions

WHAT HAPPENS INSIDE:

• thought
• emotion
• repair
• torment

NEEDS:

• food
• breath
• drink
• sleep
• connection

DESIRES:

• balance
• well-being
• presence
• gratitude and acceptance
• self-respect
• connection
• creative expression

So that’ll be my starting point tomorrow morning as I plan my 40-day program. Tonight we’re going to the Cloud Gate 2 dance performance at the Joyce Theater, which is thrilling, I can’t wait. I won’t be online over the weekend, and next week is filled with great things — Monday night a special Valentine’s Day Eve dinner with my husband, Tuesday is Valentine’s Day, Wednesday is the anniversary of my engagement to my husband way back in 2006, Thursday is dinner with a friend, and Friday we have tickets to the Thalia Follies, a political satire song-and-dance performance at Symphony Space. Wowie. What a week it’ll be. I’d better get ready.

Happy sunny Friday y’all, and have a wonderful weekend!

But one thing that has hit me about the show is the importance of grace and dignity, and carrying on. Of course that’s a stereotype about the British as a people, but the points are made explicit and implicit in Downton Abbey in such a moving way. It’s something I’ve thought about for decades; I wish I’d been able to be more graceful as a mother, with less thrashing-around. And now, as there are events going on in my life that require carrying on, and helping, and enduring through hardship, I think about it quite pointedly.

In one episode in Season 2, Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham, said that we must help each other carry on, it’s what we must do. And he said something about doing it with grace. I realized this is a value, not just a cultural tradition, or one person’s or family’s attitude. It’s a value. And it reflects a particular belief and orientation to life, that it is worth the carrying on. It reflects an ethical understanding of connection, that we are here to help each other carry on through difficult times, to celebrate with each other, to mourn with each other. That we’re intimately interconnected, because we cannot always carry on all by ourselves.

It’s hard for me to have a good understanding of myself in this regard, as it may be for everyone. We know our innermost snotty thoughts, and whiny thoughts, and the ways in which we wallow and feel sorry for ourselves. We know those things better than anyone else, because we don’t share all the unpleasant things that we feel ashamed of. But we may act differently, and we may be there for others in the way we aspire to be! So our own recognition of our secret thoughts may lead us to misinterpret ourselves overly harshly. I am currently engaged in trying to help someone carry on, and it’s hard. It’s lonely, it’s difficult, it’s taxing, it’s draining. I want to do this with as much grace as I can, and I want to help this person endure it with as much grace as possible. Am I successful? I don’t know. I am feeling sorry for myself, and feeling annoyed, and aggravated, and I bite my tongue, and I sometimes want to shake the poor person I am trying to help, I want to say “come ON.” I feel petty as I desperately long for someone to take care of me for a while, for someone to surprise me with a thoughtful moment designed solely to lift my spirits, to help me.

Perhaps this is just human, this is just me being human, and the important thing is the degree to which I manage these things myself, manage these needs myself and ask for help from others, and just be there and support and help the person I’m longing to help, with grace and dignity and focus on the importance of carrying on. I think of the great AA line: “Don’t compare your insides to other people’s outsides.” I try to imagine that the people I admire who do carry on with grace are also troubled by these kinds of inner thoughts, that they also whine and indulge in self-pity in their minds, but that I just don’t know it……as I hope the person I’m helping doesn’t know of my own troubled thoughts.

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

Isn’t that just lovely, and true?

i do love my city. it's heartbreakingly beautiful.

And today I had one of those experiences that are not at all uncommon for me. It’s bitterly cold, and I was about 20 minutes early for an appointment. There was no Starbucks in the neighborhood (what???! No Starbucks in the neighborhood???), but there was a Dunkin Donuts, so I stopped in and bought a small coffee so I could justify sitting at their little table in the window. I was very cold, and the coffee smelled so good, and I sat in the sunlight, smelling the coffee, and looking out the window at the very bright light bouncing off the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan. I saw the people curled into commas, hunched inside their thick coats against the cold, walking so fast down the sidewalk. And then it hit me, how beautiful the world is, how beautiful the constructed world is, how beautiful the natural world is, how touching it is that we all walk past each other with our struggles and joys, how beautiful winter is, against the other seasons, and I started crying. I felt cracked open by the world, as I often do. I thought “Cracked open in Dunkin Donuts” and that sounded like some kind of nutty short story. And I laughed.

Time creates and defines this moment, and it lets us understand what’s happening in this moment by allowing us to compare it against our understandings of previous moments and our imagining of future moments. Time is happening but our brains fool us and trick us into seeing what’s happening as a continuous single thing; if our brains didn’t do that, every time we blinked we’d experience the discontinuity. I’m not sure about how I’m articulating that — it’s one of the things I understand conceptually but don’t know how to say it. But I am obsessed with trying to figure out how to say it. I’ve had a couple of momentary flash experiences of being able to see time, in some way (not to sound all weird), where I saw the movement streams of people on the street. I’m sure those experiences were informed by Hollywood special effects; it’s so hard to have direct and unique experience in this media-saturated world that aren’t filtered through images we’ve already seen. But those two experiences of mine made me think about the possibility that it’s always visible and there, like the ultraviolet end of the spectrum, we just don’t have the perceptual apparatus to witness it. Or maybe we’d be so overwhelmed, and our brains evolved to save us that overwhelm and instead present clean, simple stories.

I love art that deals directly with time, like Andy Goldsworthy’s gorgeous pieces, captured on film:

His work always makes me cry, and feel so grateful to be in this beautiful world, capable of experiencing time and wonder.

I love dance that deals directly with time, like the Cloud Gate Theater of Taiwan, who performed Songs of the Wanderer. Marnie and I saw a performance of this piece, and the power of that monk, standing downstage left, with a steady stream of rice pouring on his head throughout the 90-minute piece, left us both in tears:

In early February I’m going to see a performance by Cloud Gate 2, and I know it’ll knock my socks off. If you get a chance to see them, take it!

And I love books that deal directly with time. I know I’ve been recommending this site a lot lately, but this post from Brain Pickings organized 7 must-read books on time, and I want the few I haven’t already read. If you’ve read any of the books on that list, I’d love to hear your thoughts about them!

Last year I grew in a very specific way: I became more self-possessed. That’s a very neat word, especially for someone who has always been other-possessed, past-possessed, history-possessed. Self-possessed means I take my own counsel, I have integrity and take my time, consider myself, pick and choose with the confidence of my true self. But I’m allowing myself to be overwhelmed, and it’s definitely time to stop, to take stock, to turn away from the easy seduction of immediate gratification and instead move thoughtfully and mindfully ahead. Easy to say, hard to do. I hope Saturday’s experiment gives me a start.

On Sunday my husband and I are driving to Atlantic City for a couple of days, to get out of town and keep ourselves busy and distracted while we wait for some news. We’re going ironically, and we’re Atlantic City’s worst nightmare: we don’t drink, we don’t gamble, we intend to lie around the pool or walk on the boardwalk or chill in our room, and we plan to eat.

It’d be much more interesting to go when Nucky was there, and Chalky, but alas. That’s a tv show. We’ll have a good time together making fun of the whole thing, the gamblers, the Snookies, the plastic glam and fake glitz. I’ll be taking my laptop, and since it’ll be after Saturday, I’ll be reporting live. From Atlantic City.

….family thing that happened this year was the reunion between my son and our entire family, back in February. Thank you Katie, for your hardheadedness.

….website I found is Brain Pickings, which I happily recommend to you!

….place I traveled this year — oh, what a terribly hard decision, given my travels to Turkey, Vietnam, Borneo, Malaysia, Chicago, and Austin — but if I want to choose the most forever-memorable, it’d have to be the Mekong River Delta.

….hard thing that happened this year was saying a final difficult goodbye to my dad.

***

There was a lot of knitting this year — mostly sweaters, which surprises the hell out of me! The best of my 2011 FOs, given how much I wear it, is my Wintry Mix, but Ozma’s Delight is close behind. Most people liked my Ozma’s Delight.

my ravelry page for this year's FO's, organized by favorites.

I also returned to sewing this year (well, I did make Marnie’s wedding dress last year…), making two dresses/tops for myself:

summery aqua -- the other one is purple. I need to wear them a bit more!

On my birthday November 6, I did a nice recap of my just-passed year, so I’ll link to it here to remind myself of all the stuff that happened — mostly good, but when it was bad it was bad, man. In fact, the hard parts were so hard that despite the fact that quantitatively there was so much more good, I kick 2011 in the pants on its way out the door. Sayonara, 2011! Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

But I want to close on a note of gratitude instead of the sourness of the bad, because the truth is I have more than my fair share of things to be grateful about. All my children, all 6 of them, are healthy and happy and living good lives. They struggle as we all do, but they achieve and succeed and they’re such good human beings. I’m in very good health and spent another year freelancing, which is much better for me. My husband and I traveled a lot, which is one of the things we do best together. I get to see the world more than I ever dreamed I would, which never fails to amaze me. I have wonderful friends here in New York, and sprinkled around the country and the world, and all of you enrich my life in very real ways. I have intellectual outlets that feed me — my book club and poetry group, for instance — and I live in Manhattan, where there are so many exciting and wonderful things to do, every single day. I have more than enough to eat. WAY more than enough to eat. I am happy.

So happy new year’s eve, y’all. Be safe, and here’s to 2012.

We’ve all seen our own planet from a vantage point beyond it…. startling, if you remember to think about that and how new and weird it is. We understand celestial mechanics, things going around things, planet tilts and seasons, orbit patterns. We are so sophisticated, we’re beyond fear that the night will never end. Right?

Anselm Kiefer, Gescheiterte Hoffnung (C.D. Friedrich), 2010, Charcoal on photographic paper. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York. Text on the work is translated as follows: "Wreck of Hope."

[a cranky note from the winter of my feeble little mind: why does it seem like winter doesn't really begin, and the world really gets bleak, after the solstice! i'm ready for it to start lightening up, man.]

BUT: in honor of the world turning, light returning, and all that amazing jazz, I have a handful of beautiful winter / solstice poems here, after the jump.

With winter’s gift of unimpeded sight,
I watch crows circle a dark carcass
a hundred yards off through the woods.
Only this white backdrop could make
bearable, the way the elements
have chosen whatever’s returned
as offering to the wheel. In spring
or summer we’ll come across its bones
under new growth of grass, bleached
white as stars that filter light
all this way through nets of trees.

–poem by Luisa Igloria, borrowed from Dave Bonta’s lovely site Via Negativa

***

Winter Trees by William Carlos Williams

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.

***

Alone I stare into the frost’s white face, by Osip Mandelstam

Alone I stare into the frost’s white face.
It’s going nowhere, and I—from nowhere.
Everything ironed flat, pleated without a wrinkle:
Miraculous, the breathing plain.

Meanwhile the sun squints at this starched poverty—
The squint itself consoled, at ease . . .
The ten-fold forest almost the same . . .
And snow crunches in the eyes, innocent, like clean bread.
January 16, 1937

***

Year’s End, by Richard Wilbur

Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
And held in ice as dancers in a spell
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,
They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown
Composedly have made their long sojourns,
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze
The random hands, the loose unready eyes
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

***

The Shortest Day, by Susan Cooper

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, revelling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us – listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.

For the month of January, 2012, on Saturdays I will not open my laptop at all, and I won’t knit.

I KNOW!! Isn’t that a terrifying idea? And honestly, I don’t know which part is scarier, the computer or the knitting. Can I really do it? Why should I? Would you attempt such a crazy stunt? I may need to think this through a little more; I may want to write (and in fact I do want to write), so should I instead say that I will not be online for that month of Saturdays? But if my computer is open and on my lap, how could I not just do one little email check, just take one little glance at facebook? Am I a woman, or a mouse?! [in fact, i am a mouse. a woman mouse.]

What would I do, instead? Well, actually, there’s quite a long list:

• take a walk
• do yoga
• write by hand
• read (read, read, read!)
• watch a movie
• go to a museum
• paint
• sew
• housework
• go to Central Park
• go out for coffee or brunch
• cook / bake
• meditate

And that’s just what comes to mind right off the top of my head, things I always want to do but end up not doing because instead I knit and poke around online the whole day. I think I’ll be a little bit of a weenie and just challenge myself to one Saturday, for starters. But let me take a kinder stance to myself: rather than seeing it as my being a weenie, I’ll decide to give myself the best possible chance to succeed! Yeah! Saturday, January 7, I will not open my laptop, and I won’t knit. I make this promise to myself, to encourage myself to explore more of what interests me.

Do you think I’m nuts?

I didn’t know him, really; plenty of people don’t know their parents as human beings, as people other than ‘parent.’ I didn’t grow up with him; I didn’t live with him after I was 10, we didn’t see each other at all after I was 14, and I had just met him again when I was 23. I had a few months to get to know him then, but knowing him was not possible, no matter how much I may have wanted it, because he was drunk every waking moment.

When he was a tiny little tow-headed boy, he loved to play behind the couch, quietly, with his little cars. His mother told me that story once; he kept to himself and was quiet as a mouse because his father was a rampaging, furious, out-of-his-mind alcoholic who beat the shit out of him and everyone else in the house. Just as my father would grow up to do, and to be.  He was sickly as a child, with what they then called Bright’s Disease – inflammation of his kidneys. The bad thing about this was that it meant he couldn’t eat beans, which were the staple of their diet because they were so terribly poor. When he was a teenager, he and his friends would run through the corn fields, imagining themselves robbing the Sinton, Texas banks on horseback. He longed to escape.

the man on the far right is my step-grandfather, who was a sweet man. my dad on the far left, his mother holding me

And he did escape, but it was from the frying pan and into the fire; he married my mother, who was still a high school student (though not for long…she dropped out and ran off with him). And presto, 9 months later, I was part of the scene. They were too young and too troubled, and too ill-prepared for the real life they found, and the rest of his life was terrible – magnified, I imagine, by how terrible he made the lives of his kids.

the newlyweds, plus me. they'd been married a year -- they both look kind of stunned and dazed. She's 18.

He fancied himself a Tragic Figure – initial caps, important –and he was. He was not much more than the next tragic embodiment of rage in a long line of such men, and he couldn’t escape the generations behind him. But he loved books, and reading, and he was smart. He worked as a draftsman at an architectural firm, where he was valued, even when he was too reliably drunk to keep his job. He had a child’s style of romantic notions; he loved his dogs so much, and bought an old Chevy pickup truck just to drive them around, because he thought they loved riding in the back of an old beat-up truck.

that's me, draped in his hands. he was just barely 22

Although I suffered greatly at his hands, I loved him so much, and thought he was beautiful and elegant, and I was his. He called me Scout after we watched To Kill a Mockingbird (and he probably considered himself as Atticus, which is a mighty funny stretch); he also called me Pete and Dawn Ann. Ours was a nicknaming family, obviously. I don’t remember what I called him when I was a child – daddy, probably – but usually I referred to him as Frank….though not to his face. So now I stumble when I think of him, not knowing what to call him in my thoughts.

he was 25, she was 21 -- that's me on his lap. don't they look older than they were?

I’m not writing to talk about his death, but since he is dead, his life is complete now, start to finish, so it’s part of the story. He didn’t live long, only 45 years, and he didn’t fulfill what he might’ve, and he didn’t leave any kind of positive legacy behind (well, my life does continue, and it has great value). He kind of fulfilled the circumstances of his birth, to a young mean woman who hated him and hated that he’d been born, to a young mean man who hated him as much as he hated himself, to a life of poverty and cotton gins and liquor and misery.  His birthday is usually a haunted day for me, but this year it’s not; this year, I just think of who he was, what his life was like, and I wonder who he’d be if he were alive. When I try to think about that part, I get stuck because I have to imagine a very different person than he was. My poor dad.

near the end of his life -- probably 2 months before he killed himself. he's in the dark blue shirt.

No one was ever glad he was born, and it’s kind of complicated to be grateful that he was born, but I am. I’m sorry his life was so sad and hard, and I’m sorry he made mine so sad and hard, but I’m so glad to be here, and I couldn’t be, without him. So on my dad’s birthday, I wish a happy birthday. I wish a happier birthday than he ever had. And I reaffirm my joy and gratitude at being in this world, filled with everything.

This past year of my life took me to Chicago to see Marnie, to Austin to see Katie, to the Catskills a few times, alone and with members of my family, to Laos and Cambodia to be awed, to Turkey to see all kinds of things including ancient ruins, and to Vietnam, Malaysia and Borneo to be swept away once again. It was a truly awesome year:

shortly after last year's birthday, we were in Laos and Cambodia. I spent last Thanksgiving at Angkor Wat. PINCH.

Turkey was magnificent -- this shot is of me and the ladies in Myra, at the old ampitheater

Memorial Day my husband and I returned to the Delaware Water Gap. I love that beautiful place.

a surprise electronic get-together for Mother's Day -- my son lured me to Starbucks for a video chat with him and my daughters, all of us together at once. Mothers, you know how much that means.

On Father's Day, we went to the Catskills, to Phoenicia. This is my daughter Anna.

With a friend, I went hiking in the Catskills. This was our charming guide Charlie, who I kept calling Henry for some strange reason.

I had a wonderful weekend in Chicago with Marnie and Tom. Always too short....

and then, of course, pure joy in Vietnam. Here, in the far north mountains outside Sapa.

just out walking with a few Hmong women. Like you do.

oh -- and BORNEO! Hi! I know just how lucky I am.

writing the old-fashioned way as I float down the Mekong River, through the delta. Lucky.

back to the Catskills for some leaf-peeking (while wearing my new handknit sweater!)

Katie and Trey making some truly delicious barbecue for our dinner. How is it that I didn't get more pictures?!!!

One of the most memorable things about this past year of my life was the return of my son Will. Katie came to town to find him and despite the longest odds, she did find him. Despite even longer odds, he listened. And despite the longest odds imaginable, he’s still around.

he just refuses to smile for pictures -- here he's copping his photo sneer. his smile is really beautiful.

I also finished 3 sweaters, 2 pairs of socks, 1 pair of mitts, 1 hat, 1 shawl, 2 scarves, and a cowl (and I’ll probably have another sweater or 2 finished before the calendar year ends). Not too shabby.

And another big change in my 52nd year of life is a shift to better eating (vacations notwithstanding) and strength training (though I’ve fallen off the wagon since my unfortunate broken rib, but climb back on this coming Monday). This change makes me feel so much better — better in my skin, better about how I feel and look, and strong in more ways than muscles can explain.

thinner, stronger, happier, and wearing my little handknit featherweight cardigan

I feel like I’ve learned so much this past year, and grown so much. It may have been my biggest-growth year so far, though of course I hope the coming year brings me even more. I’ve become more graceful at life, calmer, more comfortable with myself. I walk slower, breathe more often, take my time more often, take things in stride a little more easily. It hasn’t always been an easy or good year; in fact, parts of this year were among the worst I’ve had in a decade. The hard parts pushed me, left me hurt and wounded and with scars, and made me think hard about what I want from my life (but thinking hard is one of my favorite parts of life, so I’m grateful for that). I wrote about a tiny piece of this yesterday, about my big dream.

My birthday will be a happy day. My husband is taking me to the Klezmer Brunch at City Winery in Soho (klezmer! brunch! whee!), and he’s making his special orange shrimp for my dinner. It’s a gorgeous day. We’ll take a walk, I’ll talk to my family, I’ll just be so damn glad to be alive, as I usually am. For those of you who are younger than me, let me tell you that 53 is pretty damn magnificent. You have a lot to look forward to.

how beautifully leaves grow old
how full of light and color
are their last days
~john burroughs