It's been a wonderful time in New Orleans. Last New Year here was rushed, a raucous celebration bookmarked by frantic driving, home to back home again in less than three days. This year has been more sanely paced and, therefore, relaxing.
I love how things get stuck in our personal vernacular. I can't link you to her post because her blog is no longer published, but I will forever think of the Psycho Therapist when I think of New Year because I read it when she wrote this:
The Bulgarian Master Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov said the first twelve days of January represent the whole year. January 1st stands for January. January 2nd stands for February. January 3rd stands for March and so on. By practicing loving kindness, openness and generosity while giving thoughtful attention to the significance of each day, you will thereby be consecrating the New Year.
This notion has gotten stuck in my personal vernacular, the complex connections between language, thoughts and feelings that can't be stopped from coming into my head when I hear certain words in combination. Of course, it's not meant to be taken literally, and might be easily carried too far by the obsessive among us, leading to unnecessary and uncomfortable foreboding in the event that something really rotten happens in the first twelve days of the new year. That's not the point though. An exercise that makes us stop to practice loving kindness, openness and generosity can't possibly be a bad thing, under any circumstances; and giving thoughtful attention to the significance of each day is perhaps life's single most important practice; because without thoughtful (and I would add, honest) attention to the significance of each day, we, well, miss our lives in our rush to the next thing, in our struggle to let go of the in-built need to be the one who gets to decide what that next thing is going to be.
I'm glad I could come here, to New Orleans, where celebrating life in the moment has been raised to high art. I rang in 2009 in the company of bloggers Dangerblond and Cousin Pat within a throng of New Orleanians surrounding a bonfire of Christmas trees on the neutral ground in the neighborhood they call Mid-City. On New Year's Day night, we added Alli to our little cadre and went to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button at the Prytania, the first single-screen theater I've been to in years. I'm glad I saw it because it was wonderful. I'm especially glad I saw it here, in New Orleans, to which it is a visual love letter. It also makes the same point that is made by the notion of consecrating each new year: life is fleeting, loss random and pervasive, and connection with each other, love, amidst a journey that is by definition solitary, is what lasts.
Sometime soon, this blog's Hit Counter will pass 1,000,000 (the first 100,000 were the hardest). My geekiness stops short of understanding the criteria through which Blog-City's fine management reaches that number, but I'll take it. Some things it's better not to know. My point is that I wouldn't trade it for the world, what I've gained in human relationship, that which lasts, from blogging. Without taking away from my beloved friends and family who've escorted and supported me to here, those still with us and those who have passed on or wandered away, this new dimension this late in life has been the most wonderful sort of surprise, as they would call it here, lagniappe. My only resolution for 2009 is to savor it all.
Happy New Year, y'all. Thank you so much for being here. To borrow a phrase that's also been forever changed in my previously mentioned personal vernacular by the previously mentioned movie, it was nice to have met you.
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