Thank You

Walking strange winding paths. Happy? Yes, insofar as that word applies.

It's not a trustworthy word, though. It originally meant "lucky," and it implies the ideology of the lottery. What the world gives, it can, and sooner or later will, take away. Which doesn't mean you shouldn't delight in the gifts of the day. It just means you shouldn't mistake a tent for a house.

So. A new year. I'm a little suspicious of stock-taking: it always seems to me to say a lot more about one's mood at the moment than about the period supposedly under review. Still I pause and look back.

It has been a year of extraordinary, intense love. A year in which everything has been broken loose and jumbled together. It's been a year of Chinese (which I now formally announce I intend to give up). It's been a year of experimenting with diet (I have learned a lot and settled nothing). It's been a year of seriously replacing the car and bus with the bicycle, as my main method of personal transportation (to my great delight and to the serious improvement of my health. Swoosh!). Of replacing Powell's with the Library. Of Coleridge and of the 18th Century, of a little dabbling in listening to classical music. It's been a year of modest growth in my massage practice, which (given the miserable Oregon economy), pleases me.

I have traveled not at all. No further than Breitenbush. I have rather let friendships languish. Likewise, I have not paid much mind to writing, this year. It happens or it doesn't. A few good poems early in the year, but since then mostly fallow. Doesn't trouble me. There are still fish in the sea bigger than any that have come out of it.

I am happy. Working at the Library Foundation fills me with joy: I have never had a job in which I love, admire, and trust everyone I work with. I don't know that I've ever even heard of such a thing.

Bless you, dear friends, bobbing with me in this little coracle of the present on the huge sea of time. I won't say goodbye yet, but I will say thank you. Thank you. Thank you.