During this very first week of January, I hold off the temptation to look too far ahead, in order to pause in the threshold for a short moment and savor  the past year. Looking back though my weekly blog posts, I am reminded of the small moments that make up one’s grand life: the way we keep ourselves present, fluid, and in touch with the important stuff. I offer the following tidbits, photos, and links from 2017, as a reminder to you of all we have been through, and just how resilient we all are despite the difficulties. 2018 may present challenges, but with the strength inherent in our past, what can we not overcome?

In no particular order, here are 5 posts I am glad I revisited. Hope you will be too.

Glimpse Heaven

After a blue sky day, when the sun drops behind the ridge and our mini-fire-pit reaches a heated pitch, we glimpse heaven on earth as snowy yard goes from blue to pink to purple. We stand witness and declare, weekends are the best! Afternoons outdoors, chatting about nothing, sitting silent for a few fleeting moments. Living beyond the work week is all we’re really after, right? Fire and sky, feet on the earth, with time on our side, now that’s a Saturday worth remembering.

Epiphany for a New Year

4. Guiding Star

Find yours. Whatever it is. Your yoga practice or your rabbi’s words, your divining rod or your guardian angel, regardless, set a course toward your best self, and use your own spiritual beliefs to glimpse what that just might look like. Solo or with your congregation, catch a glimmer of those hopeful and healing and healthy and divine rays with regularity.

More Life

What is it about familial that ties us to each other? What is it about their story that connects so easily to our own? My extended family is huge, and we all float about in our own spaces and places, but once we converge around a table, those ties linking us bind like golden threads. The conversations may be all about your antics as a toddler or your own grown children’s accomplishments, it matters not, for the cradle of hope is tangible and tactile and pure comfort. You even, unplanned, arrive at the luncheon date in similar hues. You match the ocean and sky. You feel all those who are gone but are present all the same.

You Might As Well Imagine Something Worth While

Shit Show

It really isn’t because I’m reading Claire Dederer’s latest memoir, Love and Trouble, but I must admit, she’s gotten me thinking. About how I wished I wrote with her daring pen. About all those crazy-ass years when I was running straight into the black, and these slightly more stable years, when some of that crazy is boomeranging back. But it isn’t totally that either, it’s my job and the demands that are clear insanity but you can’t actually admit to it because it’s your job after all and you need to keep it a few more years; it’s the guy in the White House who I can’t bring myself to call president or give his title a capital letter but still, you know he’s there and the whole world is acting like he didn’t in fact steal the election but somehow might be qualified even though he’s the very definition of shit show; it’s about summer’s abrupt end and my love of drinking a tad too much rosé, okay my addiction that hasn’t stopped even though I know better and one should stop drinking Summer’s Water once it’s officially Autumn; but ultimately it’s about racing and racing every day ahead of just about every deadline so that I can feel like I have it together but know I don’t. Yeah, today, it’s all of that.

I have no idea what lies ahead, good, bad, or in between, but you can be certain I will give it my full Nine Cents… Thank you for being a reader of my scrappy words, for leaving your sweet comments, and for being willing to walk this rocky road called living with me.

2018, I welcome all you have in store, as long as I have this village with me.

XXOO