A Year of Hope...

I am drifting.  I am drifting back through my memories.  As I go, I trace my memories with my fingertips the way I would woodgrain.  In the wood, a buried history is marked, made by the passage of time, season by season.  Here is a shape.  Here is a name.  A weaving of lines, letters, and symbols, unfurl at my touch.  What lays before me is a year, splayed wide like a split tree trunk.  It is a year in review. 

If I were to call this past year anything, it would be deemed A Year of Change.  I think "change" is like the weather; there is always weather.  Be it fair or foul, there is always weather.  But there are some years where there is more rain and some with less – times of drought and times of flood.  This year was flooded with possibilities.  It was swollen with the opening of doors and the moving currents of change.

It hasn't been an easy ride.  Sometimes the waters were choppy, but I think that out of it, out of struggle came something even more beautiful, a sense of community and stronger friendships and even more personally, a better sense of self.  I've moved, literally and figuratively, towards making what's important to me paramount.  The journey to finding the road has been richly studded with new experiences and the remembrance of old ones, good ones.

For the new year, I'll make no resolutions nor promises, but one – 

the one to have HOPE.

So to you, all of you, beautiful and wonderful and magical people out there reading these words, I give you, from the very core of my being, hope.  A little four letter word, that fostered with love and friendship and kindness will bloom and grow powerfully.  It will grow.  It will grow and nurture and give shelter and abundance.  Let this next year, be a year filled with hope.