Goodbye. Hello.

No rage against the dying of the light. Bring it on. Let the solstice have its day. Our occasion to shed and recede inward, to find our deep pools toward renewal. Out of the mud, a lotus.

If you don’t like it take the A train down to Santiago or Sydney where that other solstice reigns. After today in this hemisphere days elongate, bulbs underground push up a fraction and the calendar flips to another imagined number.

Goodbye 2013. We’re done with your dose of discontent, year of infamy, of fractures and dysfunction, micro, macro. Up from the nadir in their sleep skeletal trees dream of green pastures. The body’s architecture is reminded how to knit its wounds. Maybe polar parties will budge and budget their way to sense.

This is my year-end letter to myself. The children are well into their respective journeys. We have no dog that didn’t die but we did throw out a few stuffed animals, lightened our shelves of some books and assorted objet d’art. We traveled the way the bird of paradise travels with its orange beak pointing to some imagined place.

Instead we rearranged the furniture of our lives confronting the accumulated years and its demands of walker, cane, transfer chair and handicap bars to steady us in the shower.  It’s fun getting old…sort of. Our love found a new intimacy and expression in caregiving.  In the offering there is a creative burst, a new door to walk through as others close. Being there for each other and extending our reach is a gift both given and received.

So I greet 2014. Hello out there. What have you got for us? Happy New Year. Together we’ll redefine Happy and discover resources lying dormant ready to spring and flower. What more can be asked of life other than a fullness of discovery in that continent within?