January 1, 2012

I've been doing some thinking about writing, blogging, sharing... and my plans for this newest year include, shorter entries... like post cards.  The year I spent exchanging haiku with my sweet friend in California was not only fun but required creating snapshots of life, descriptive and revealing, distilled into three lines totalling seventeen syllables.  It was incredibly difficult, like trying to describe an emotion when the vocabulary has yet to be imagined.

I'm also considering using this format, intimate, solitary, to write letters.  There are so many things that are left unsaid when life ends unexpectedly.  No, I'm not planning on leaving any time soon but who knows.  If I discovered that I only had a year to live how would I want to do that?  The truth is ... we always live as if we have forever.  As if tomorrow will always be there to do the fun things that today's chores don't allow for.

I want to try, with your help, to find what really matters in every moment of this newest year... and to appreciate, to savor, to enjoy.  I thought after Shannon 'left' that happy wasn't going to be a part of my life.  Happiness was frivalous and periferal and if I could embody a quiet joy, that would be enough but now I'm not so sure.

Yesterday was planned.  Our beautiful live tree from "Crazy Joe's" is just beginning to drop needles and I'm ready to take it down and move it into the woods.  New bedding for Shannon's room, a way to create a space for both of us, brighter, lighter, subtle shifting.  Wash curtains and iron the new dust ruffle, but plans are not to be a part of 2012 without embracing, whole hearted-ly, flexibility.

Pondering a return to work on Tuesday without my splicing partner makes me sad.  He was part of last years' reduction in force and is moving toward bigger and brighter things.  I will miss him.  His favorite response to any of my moaning was, "It is what it is Miss Jan".  I learned a great deal from this young man, two years younger than Shannon.  With any luck the truth of  his words and his positive outlook will buffer my attitude when patience runs thin.

There is a gentle stirring, like a whispered excitement that there are wonderful things just over the horizon in this new year.  I feel it in that tender spot just below my breastbone, just above my navel.  It brings tears to my eyes when I acknowledge it.  Perhaps that is where we experience what we can't always see.  The memory of who we really are, our unspoken connection to the Divine.  I'm not sure but it fills me with a calm that is all too often missing in the whirlwind of my life.

So I breathe it in.

Sweet, gentle, peaceful moment.

I remember you.

 

Comments

[BJ Paskett]

Jan thank you for the beauty in your words, the beauty in your heart.
Thank your making me feel different now then before I read your beautiful words.

[Mike Justice]

Love this!