Happy New Year

2007,

May this New Year bring you joy in your pain

hope in your trial, challenge with gain.

May strength in temptation

and courage in fear

grace this new living with lasting good cheer.

May successes be real ones and critics be still

unless in their speaking

they show you God’s will

May your heart be tender and your vision clear

May you say when it’s ended,

“It’s been a good year.”

Donna Woodall,

Silent New Year

New Years Eve makes me melancholic. Don't know why, but I'm always restless and displaced on New Years Eve. Well, here's a bit of a strange write. You don't have to like it and by the way, I'm certifiably sane. (Had to pass the tests for education and for social services.)
Restless, anxious.
Wanting former days; wanting future days.
Wanting anything but this moment and its solitary plight.
Walking into a moonlit spot, I look out in expectation or is it despair?
I hear the babes rustling in their bunks, striving for ordered sleep.
Yet in my true self, I know.
Babes no longer lie in the other room safe from reveling drivers with too much to drink.
Loneliness sits there instead.
Silently in pain the space cries out.
Inside my heart the space cries back
to no avail.
In silent moonlight I begin the ritual dance.
The silence is not broken by word, or song or clattering explosions heard a short time past.
Instead, the silence gnaws and claws
devouring my waiting heart.
It would be sensible to go to bed now
to wrap myself in the numbness of sleep
to dull these keen senses that reach out for –
what? I do not know.
I wish my slumbering prince were riding through the night
to enter on the brisk east wind and whisk me away to a place
where there is no now:
no screaming silence clamoring for fulfillment,
bursting with unmade plans, unanswered visions, untold stories.
I sweep it away, and sweep it away, frantically striving to rid my world of its cry.
Yet the silence stays while all others abandon.
Soft tears surround my submissive form crumbling on the floor
Time? Time is a cruel master.
It stole my youth, my children, my vigor and left behind this crumpled mass:
a wadded loveletter, discarded without reading, its message bleeding in a bitter pool of tears.
These irrational thoughts and feelings surely belong to another.
This purposeless form cannot be the person who will face the coming dawn.
This bereft woman bears no resemblance to sparking eyes enthralled with family and tasks.
Some would not trust me if they knew.
And so with a sigh, I stand and stretch,
peer once more into the moonlight of a new day,
whisper my felicitation and stumble noisily to my bed, and my prince,
in hopes that the sweeping of the floor,
that the forward bracing of the wind,
that the solitary moonlight dance and the gentle dreams that lay in store
will usher in the fulfillment of this new age,
this new destiny,
this brand new year.

Light

I waited before your throne

Enraptured by the coming sun

Knowing the light would blind my eyes but not my heart.

A phenomenon in the dark forboding clouds

I saw the light of the Son break through

with peace, renewal and love.



This drawing was done after a painting that I struggled with and still do.  Sitting in self absorption, music engulfing and yet with space to think and create, my mind realized that I had missed the point.  It was the light!

Entry for December 10, 2006

I look up and see only lavendar-grey clouds.

My heart sinks yet my eyes cannot.  I know there will be light.  The light will surely come.  I need the light to break the horizon and fill my world with illumination, good will.

But the greyness shrouds the morning.

Most days, it's no big deal.  An extra cup of coffee, a sweet roll and a little laughter for inspiration: I'm up an out.  But today the coffee is bitter, the sweet roll is stale and any laughter I try for cakes in my throat.

This heaviness, this unspeakable weight shrouds my spirit as the greyness shrouds the morning.   It encases me in hopelessness: speaking defeat, rejection, despair.

I wait fruitlessly.  Yet a voice is calling me out of my tomb, out of the cold heart, the aching heart: a soul in need.

With waning strength, I meet the task and feel the sting of my own inadequacy.  Barely strength remains to creep back to my hole, hide and wait for the light to break into my world.  Yet another and another interrupts my pilgrimage until the day is nearly gone.

What is this light that breaks forth now: now that the day has taken what I did not possess?  I cannot tell its source and yet it shines before me and in my wake.

With little strength I reach out to touch it and find that it comes from within, passing through and out of me with illumination and goodwill.

I've Lollygagged

We don't do life easy.  Louis and I used to say when we had Shambley - our former dog- that some day we'd both wake up and the dog would be driving.

Well, I haven't fallen off the face of the earth.  I just had a few intensely busy days. 

I’ve lollygagged today and felt really guilty.  Ah, not too guilty.  I had a show last week for my HS Class and a Party last night for the Christian artists forum I belong to.  Those two things should never be booked back to back. 

The kids were supposed to help with the matting, etc of their pieces for the show.  Well they changed the schedule and I had to do all 17 pieces by myself.  My studio was a mess of chopped up matt and cardboard.  I turned 4 extra tall narrow doors into a large display board for it and prepared promo materials for the sessions beginning in January.  Then, because the front came through and sat on us for 2 days, the place where we scheduled the event was flooded and it had to be postponed!


Meanwhile, Louis has been emptying and organizing storage and bringing the stuff in and stacking it around for me to deal with.  I sort of understand, but had to deal with that stuff before I could begin cleaning and decorating for the party.  They rescheduled the show for last night (Mon) and so I didn’t even get to go stand around and listen to the comments or answer questions about what, why and what’s next.

I got most of the decorating done by Sunday and though I did have to pick up a little to teach a lesson on Friday, I decided to ignore the Study and Studio and just keep the party in the main part of the house. 

I had about everything done and ready –fresh baked sweet bread, almond cookies, red and green pretzels, wassail, holiday punch, pinon coffee set up in the coffee maker.  The fireplace was ready for a match, the cd player ready to turn on.  But a few hours before the party, a member called to ask if he could have a place to set up slides to show.  Okay.  I’d just have to get in there and clean up the studio for him.  He showed up about 6:30 and nothing was done.  I’d had bunches of phone calls and people in and out.  It was crazy.  I suggested we set it up in the living room.  That wouldn’t work.  So his daughter and I began to clean the studio.  Nothing had been dusted or mopped or vacuumed, but there was no time for that.  I  hauled stuff out to the clay room where I piled it high and then onto the studio porch.  It went okay, but it wasn’t clean and I was so busy with it that the guests came and had to attend each other while I finished.  Sigh.  So much for the reputation I don’t have.

The party was a good humored event.  So much food, so many choices.  What I listed above was just what I contributed.  And I forgot to put out the spinach and roast beef pinwheels.  They were very good and Louis and I are enjoying the fact that they weren't eaten by the guests.  They consumed about a gallon of wassail and about a gallon and a half of holiday punch.  The pinon coffee was all gone and I could have made another pot, but things got busy. 

We played a version of the white elephant gift exchange game equipped with the two or three unwanted and the two or three really wanted gifts.  I gave one of the really wanteds and received one of the unwanteds, but who cares in the end!  One of the unwanteds was a Christmas tree with little black ribbons and little black balls.  It had a little black satin skirt attached and everyone called it the goth tree.  Another was a set of paperbacks and a cd.  The reason it was an unwanted was because it was received initially by a retired divorced lady and the one title that jumped out was something about handling your husband's mid-life crisis.  We all made jokes about our husbands and about her burying hers in the back yard.  The other titles were decent titles as was the cd.  But no one wanted it after that.

We watched the slides and yes they were worth it.  I must admit that even the slide he took while we steamed in the car in Colorado was worth it!  We sang some carols and we waved them off into the cold night, cleaned up the mess and went to bed happy.

So today I took it a little easy.  Tomorrow I'll finish cleaning the clay room and set my studio back up for teaching.  It will be fast and furious.  It's the way I live my life.  But today I lollygagged.