Tag Archives: new year

Storytime

1 Jan

leap year page 1

Here in Los Angeles, California, it’s just shy of three hours to the close of January 1st, 2016. Today’s not been much different than any other day, closer to weekend-style even though it’s Friday, but not quite the same because one of my roommates is out of town, and the other is recovering from a long stretch of mandated human interaction, and I myself just returned from The Hellhole That Is Currently Underwater.*

But still, all in all, pretty much the same as any other day. January 1st has no particular magic to create a grand shift in my life. It is just an arbitrary designation of the passage of time.

Except… we don’t want it to be, do we? We want there to be some power in the rustle of a new calendar being hung on the wall. We want there to be some force that we can harness through the symbolic gesture of wiping the slate clean. Whatever the year, we want 01/01 to be not just one more day full of nothing more than more of the same, but rather to be one glistening 24-hour chance to grasp hold of a future we haven’t yet tainted. A notebook that’s got no smudges or eraser marks. A slab of clay, wet and waiting, for us to pick up and do something with.

We want it to be the start of a new story, ripe for the telling.

2016 is a particularly good year for that, it seems. We’ve got a leap year ahead. One whole extra day for awesome.

And I, who makes much of her living out of words, sits here at the close of page 1 of 366 wonder – what makes a good story? What do I want?

What do you want?

What makes a story worth it, after it all, when you’re running out space for lines on the page and midnight is tolling and another book, another voice, another year is chasing at your heels? What is it in a story that will leave you satisfied at “the end” – or even better, hungry for more?

If you’ve got some thoughts to tell, I’d like to listen.

——-

* Missouri. Not necessarily an intrinsically bad place, but a historically terrible destination for me in particular. Also, it’s rained so much there in the past few days that a house literally floated away. It was on the news, guys.

It can be okay in the summer, though.

Just… mind the tornadoes.

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A Resolution

31 Dec

I’m not really one for the whole “New Year’s Resolution” thing. As someone who’s gone through years and years and more goddamn years of recovery, I’ve seen through myself that change is usually not something that happens through one grand turn around, one definitive pivot. It is a slow, gradual, back and forth of deciding and un-deciding and re-deciding over and over again, until somehow, as each sand grain of nearly unnoticeable tremorous choice has slipped through the infinitesimally small bottleneck of the hourglass of our life, we look up and realize all of a sudden – it’s over. I’ve done it. The sand has all passed through now. And in the struggle of the moment, I didn’t even notice.

It is the second-by-second way we live our life that matters. Sure, change can begin with some grand declaration, but a proclamation is not the same as an action. And as history has shown in coups and diets, monumental momentary revolutions rarely last. Change requires more upkeep than that.

And so with all that in mind, I’ve written my hope for the world as turn the page 2014. A hope not so much for resolution, but for recovery.

possibility

2014

My wish this year, as we turn the page once more,
is that we will embrace a new language for these further pages,
to write a story no longer of the old deadbeat rhythm and rhyme
we have clattered with and clod along, year after year,
but instead a story the sound of which is strange in the ears of life,
the new noise of decisions spoken in a different tongue,
To build the world, not break it.
To grow new life, not gore it.
To turn hope into happening
and loss into learning.
To realize that the chance to change
is not tomorrow but all the yesterdays that were today,
and that with every second the breath of possibility whispers,
“Now.”

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