#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream

. . . Something’s set to start,
there’s meadow-music in the dark
and the clouds that shroud the mountain
slowly, softly start to part. . .

~ Excerpt from Matt Goodfellow, “Poem for a New Year”

This morning I woke early, and set out early, and it was not so cold, but there is ice, and there is so much water in the wetlands, and I wandered and wandered at a very slow pace spending just exactly as much time as I wanted exploring for pictures. I felt very peaceful, the day opening into anticipation of an ending and a new beginning. In the poetry workshop, it felt festive, to be workshopping fine poems on a New Year’s Eve. I shared my brand new poem, about the new year, and got good feedback that was helpful. In the afternoon, my daughter and I went into the city to meet my husband at the new apartment of my youngest and we all helped them move. How fun, to move into a new apartment on New Year’s Eve. And Will’s mother and father helped too, and we wore our masks, and it also felt very festive to be helping them all together. I wrote my newsletter today, and scheduled it to go out at 11:45 p.m. tonight because I am very conscious, more so than many years, of making this shift from one year to the next, the boundary of it, the transition. Tonight I listened to some music, including the song below that I share with you (a lovely adaptation of Tennyson’s “Ring Out Wild Bells” from his poem “Memoriam”, and meditated quietly. The losses, the losses of so many to this disease, the overwhelming level of grief for so many, it’s heartbreaking and infuriating and shocking and incomprehensible.