The New Year Creates New Beginnings

            I love new beginnings.  New Year’s Eve is my favorite.  A day to meditate on what has passed and what is to come, excites me.  Questions of what do I want to change or improve electrify my mind.  My favorite way to celebrate this transition of time was in LA.  The church Scott and I attended had a 11:00 service on New Year’s Eve.  We would worship, and the pastor would talk about a focus word and scripture for the coming year.  Stationary would be passed out and in the twenty or so quiet congregational minutes we would write a letter to ourselves.  The letter was to cover three things; gratitude for something completed in the closing year, guidance in the current moment of growth, and what I wanted to see God do in the year to come.  All would self address the envelope, and hand them to the ushers.  Three months later, the church would send them out and I would be able to evaluate where I was in my year.  The community seeking the divine through worship and prayer was perfect. 

                Sitting here, overlooking a sparkling lake which reflects an azure sky, I savor.  This has been a year of endings.  Austin is managing high school well.  Zachary graduated from home schooling and entered public high school.  A year of grieving my brother-in-law’s suicide concluded.  Scott found a happy place in Corporate America again.   A lifelong regret not only received closure, but forgiveness.  Answers to voids in a significant relationship create possibilities.  While parts of me dance with joy, a considerable part of my self wants to curl up and sleep for a hundred years.  I feel exhausted!   Eight years of fighting for optimism, striving for security, encouraging and cheerleading the discouraged around me, has left me drained.  I hear the question floating in my consciousness, “What do I do now?”  As I sit with my legs dangling upon the precipice of a new frontier. 

                Similar to what Persephone must feel every year, rising out of Hades to visit her mother Demeter, I feel wonder.  As the cold and dead of the past lays before me I am excited for possibilities.  I run to embrace a season of discovery and growth.  I understand I must wait for spring green buds to appear on the trees around me.  I will watch for daffodils, snowdrop and edelweiss to be nourished by the mulch left from fall.  With the power of growth, they will push away snow in order to bloom.  I find myself discovering me.  My focus, for as long as I can remember, is to exist for the service of my fellow man.  My worth and existence relied upon my ability to fulfill their every request.  I would not allow myself to have desires, dreams or hopes.  Joy is something I rejected and in fact it scares me.  In this moment, I am curious about who I am.  For the first time in my life, I have a desire to explore what I am able to do.  Accepting my own limits feels freeing instead of suffocating.  With the strength of a toddler, I step into this year of discovering joy.

                As I totter into this new found self, I pause.  Where will I go and what will I do?  Holding the hand of my Creator and listening to his whispers, I will create goals and plans for myself with a purpose to fulfill them.  Reneging on promises to me is out of fashion.  I resolve to explore the kinds of art that lay before me.  Writing, sewing, photography and empty canvases are hidden all throughout closets in the house.  These projects will be found and played with.  In some places I will have to start over because growth was distracted by grief.  The Artist’s Way might have the dust brushed off, and revisited. 

A fragrance of joy will fill my life.  What will bring your life joy this year?  I challenge you, dear reader, to pause.  Ask yourself three questions.  What have I done?  Where am I?  Where do I want to go?  Make peace with regrets.  Touch base with the present.  Face the future.  The clock is ticking and the adventure waits.  Where will it find you?