I'm not exactly sure.
I think that's why it was so hard to blog. Everything seemed unclear there for a while. I found myself revisiting all sorts of actions and feelings from the past, looking at them in a new way. I felt the grief for my late parents again, or perhaps I should say I felt a new sense of loss for and celebration of them for the first time. I revisited the way my home was arranged, and moved most of the things in it until it felt more authentic to the way I feel and live now. I sold some things I had owned for decades, and donated many more. I revisited the issue of my writing, which again got pushed rather onto the back burner during the year, and the related issue of my teaching and consulting business.
Several times during the process I had flashes of memory from my childhood days on the beach. The motion of the waves fascinated me. And the complex, moody play of colors. The endless changes and movements. The way the water moved the things in its path. Some of the round, heavy pebbles of that northern beach seemed barely jostled by each new wave, but as I stood there, rooted and watching, they did move, sometimes quite far.
That's probably why I remembered those beachside experiences during this time. They seemed a newly apt metaphor for the place where I find myself. Little in my life seems to have changed, and at times I feel that I have made little progress. And yet even the heaviest of the stones move if I wait long enough, and muster enough patience for the slow, eddying work of time.
From my place in the ebbing and flowing of life, I send a New Year's Greeting to all of you out there, and wish that you will have a deep and fluid twenty-eleven. You will find me posting here again, now that I know once more where I am. I am here on the beach, honing my capacity to muster the grace and patience to let the rocks move.
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