“i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that I catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what I said to myself
about myself. . .”

Excerpt from “i am running into a new year,” by Lucille Clifton

I forgot to feed the pigs. A whole day or two. That’s what I was dreaming when I woke up, and it was a horrible feeling to wake into. We were away, and we had brought the pigs with us, they still lived with us, and we were attending an conference on improving education for young people, and they were in a barn where we were staying, and I got distracted by the conference. When I remembered, I went straight to the barn, and they were weak and miserable, but they were alive, and I entered the pen and fed them. It was good to be in the pen, close to them, able to make my amends. This seems to be a new pattern, dreaming vividly in the final moments of a night’s sleep. I woke up and sent my weekly Aim for Astonishing writing prompt, and based it this week on the Lucille Clifton poem about running into the new year. And then I worked some on revising the riptide poem, and on my walk had some insights, took some notes, some more discoveries about this poem. I hope to have a revision by the end of the week to take to my Friday workshop in Concord. It’s warmer, the ice still in thaw on a cloudy morning, and I immediately sink a boot through the ice into the shallow cold and walk with my one wet foot for a long time. I think about the pigs, the ones in my dream, the ones in my psyche, that are hungry and need to be fed. These are pigs that are meant to be fed, not eaten. They deserve to be fed, they cannot feed themselves. Tonight is dark rain, a freezing rain that will be black ice in the morning. I wrote from the prompt (you can read it here) I sent out today and surprised myself with encountering a deep seated rivalry and jealousy in the photo I wrote from. It was reciprocal. I was jealous of her, she was jealous of me. And I could see how toxic and charged and insidious and pointless and inevitable this jealousy was and how it shaped my childhood. And I was also glad to see it so clearly, to have this shadow in the light where I can see it.