Natalie and I celebrate the end of the world with matching pajamas that kind of match our kitty too
Although I know the Mayans didn’t actually predict the end of the world for today but rather, a new cycle, the evening after the much-publicized (for scorn and whimsy) end is quite lovely. It entailed doing many things I love: rearranging the furniture in a room (our bedroom), cooking (or at least tossing for a festive fruit salad and massive green one to go with the brisket in the crock pot), visiting with my kids (two of whom powered onto the home base in the last few hours), straightening out my necklace collection, and sitting quietly by myself (like right now).
For me, this is the end of the a cycle. I turned in evaluations of my students just the other day (the Goddard equivalent of grading students, only far more time-consuming), finished most of The Divorce Girl book tour (20-something readings in 10-something states), launched Needle in the Bone, and finished my part on two renga collections (one just out, To the Stars Through Difficulties). There’s been an overwhelm of travel along with meeting so many people that my mind dog-paddles in a mess of forgotten names but remembered faces.
There’s also turnings in the lives of my kids, one of whom has launched himself into the post-college, so-this-is-life? years; another who is aiming herself with great speed toward finishing college in a semester; and a third who has started to make that senior-year-of-high-school shift toward what comes next. For Ken, a new cycle is so much about the retirement of someone who he worked closely with for all of his 22 years at KNI, and just today was the retirement party full of people he’s worked with past and present (probably future too).
At the same time, whatever Mayan prophesy or any other says, and however much there are large and wild-swooping turns that change everything on a dime in individual lives or for the whole world, new cycles start all the time. Every day. Every time the head lands on the pillow in the dark. At any given moment. For this reason, I grab hold of any new year, new cycle, new day, whether it’s Dec. 31st, the moving target of Rosh Hashana each fall, the Chinese New Year each winter, or something like a Mayan prophesy fueled by the Facebook self-stimming of millions.
So happy what comes next to us all, and may the next day that follows this evening be full of love lighting the way.
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