The Year’s End

As a New Year breaks open and my life is laden with blessings and great joy – I can’t help but feel the underlying bittersweetness of the passage of time. I see my daughters physically and emotionally changing with each passing day. They are more opinionated and certain of where they are headed, so confident and curious. This baby boy who came into the world what feels like moments ago is now more than a month old and feels like he has been with us forever. The days are long and the years are ever shorter. I feel myself taking snapshots of the day to day experiences in my mind – willing myself to remember these fleeting moments.

As we pass from one year into the next I am full of gratitude for healthy children, this space on the blog where I can share and learn, a husband who works furiously to provide us with this incredible life, and teachers who love our family and make us wiser and inspire us each and every day. I resolve to be more present and less plugged in, gossip less, show compassion more, and be more grateful in this year to come. I want to be the kind of person that people look at and say, “Wow. I want more of that peace that she seems to have.” I want to inspire those around me.

It’s hard for me to sum it all up but below are a collection of quotes I have poached from Lindsey Mead’s brilliant blog “A Design So Vast”. She is so smart and well-read. She’s a mama who loves with all she has and I am in awe of all she shares. These words written by others embody so much of what has been in my mind recently. I am grateful for the writing of others that encapsulates the feelings in my heart.

Allow beauty to shatter you regularly.  The loveliest people are the ones who have been burnt and broken and torn at the seams yet still send their open hearts into the world to mend with love again, and again, and again.  You must allow yourself to feel your life while you’re in it.

-Victoria Frederickson

Do not ask your children to strive for extraordinary lives. Such striving may seem admirable, but it is a way of foolishness. Help them instead to find the wonder and the marvel of an ordinary life. Show them the joy of tasting tomatoes, apples, and pears. Show them how to cry when pets and people die. Show them the infinite pleasure in the touch of a hand. And make the ordinary come alive for them. The extraordinary will take care of itself.

– William Martin

There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact.

– Milan Kundera

This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly. ~Rilke

The sun was out after a sojourn behind some clouds.  Planes glinted in the sunlight and gradually diminished in the distance, leaving a trail of noise.  A light breeze took the edge off the heat.  The moment struck her as perfect, in the way that quotidian moments sometimes did.  She tried to freeze it in her mind: the acid sweetness of her apple, the crunch of it against her teeth, the smell of the grass.  It was cheating, in a sense, to circumvent the natural sifting process of memory, but she found that those moments when she stopped and thought I’m awake! as though in the midst of a dream, were ones she remembered with an uncommon clarity.

– Matthew Thomas, We Are Not Ourselves

What fools we are, she thought, to love something so brief, so fragile, as life. And especially that handful of sweet, little-children years.

– Julia Fierro, Cutting Teeth

Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you. You must travel it by yourself. It is not far. It is within reach. Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know. Perhaps it is everywhere – on water and land. -Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Time after time I realized that everything I want or need – the living truth of life, love, beauty, purpose, and peace – is taught to me right here, no further away than the ground beneath my feet.

– Karen Maezen Miller, Paradise in Plain Sight

“I want to thank you, Lord, for life and all that’s in it. Thank you for the day and for the hour, and the minute. ” – Maya Angelou

Here’s to another year of divine gifts, growth and gratitude. Blessings to all of you sacred readers in 2015!

image: Manchester, VT December 2014