EBB AND FLOW: apologies and a new year's greeting

When I opened up this blog today I was shocked to see that I had not posted here since October. How could more than two months have passed? Where have I been?

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.

A PERFECT LITTLE FILM ON THE PASSAGE OF TIME

Though it uses no fancy techniques and makes no startling statements, this little film on the passing of time is a quiet gem. If you have children or grandchildren, it will surely speak to you; but if you don't, it will probably speak to you anyway. It is from Gretchen Rubin, the author of the New York Times bestseller The Happiness Project.

FORGOTTEN TIMES, FORGOTTEN REMNANTS

The news last week reported that archaeologists working at the Ground Zero site in New York have found a ship buried in the eighteenth century as part of the extension of the land in lower Manhattan. (Click here for the story as reported with the most historical background.)


It's not yet clear how much of the ship is intact or what its actual date and significance is, and though the details will probably be interesting I don't much care about them. What captured my imagination in the story is the layering of history of which the story reminds us. Cycles of birth and death, creation and destruction: that's always the way of things. A house witnesses births and deaths, celebrations and griefs. Land is excavated and built up, demolished and build up again. What once were roads become parks and what once were parks become roads. And a city landscape destroyed by one century's plane is found to be built on the remains of another century's ship, in a place another century's people were trying to make better use of.

There's nothing in this discovery that makes Ground Zero less stark or sad. (As a former worker there, I have to admit that I've never been able to visit the site since 9/11.) Yet it does remind us that change, of whatever kind, is part of the nature of things. We are all part of time's complicated layering, for all that we feel unique in both our accomplishments and our pain; and what we think is buried often rises again, in some other form, at some other time.