I haven’t written very much this year. Today I am challenging myself on this point.   Writing is contemplative, painting is contemplative.  I have so few creative products to remember this year.  Have I lived an “unexamined year??”

Here at the last hours of the solar year called 2019, I am contemplating how quickly we have arrived at 2020. And once again Mary Oliver’s words spin around in my head. She died this year in January.

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Think of how many people have read this and taken it to heart?

Revisiting my personal 2019 via electronic notes and images, I can review the “doing and undoing,” putting together and dismantling, that is the standard for most built on a biological platform.

I practice this type of shamanic dismemberment as a life skill, it is my soul’s work this time around.  This year I have enjoyed travel to unexplored places in my mind, and meditations from different parts of the world, in different parts of the world.

I have rummaged around in my cryptic sometimes illegible journals, scanned my anecdotal narratives from desktop folders with quirky names like:

“Things that go bump” or “If I could say anything.”

 These are the seeds of writings that haven’t germinated, yet. There is time, or there isn’t?.  No need to be concerned, it will sort itself out. In the spirit of those “end of year” reviews, I am offering some images that have brought me the most joy.

Events that bring anything else will be jettisoned shortly.

I hope you will take a few moments, or a day! to remember your heart expanding events of this year. Reach into the memory. Write it down. Harvest what you have sown this year.

And for those hard sad, disappointing times, write these too.  Write them in detail, letting the emotions of each bubble up and finally be exhaled.  Allow the emotions to get out of your body in whatever bodily function that suites.

When you are done, keep the list that you would like to manifest next year,

and shred or better yet-burn the other.

It has been a rich year. I am grateful for my freedom from hunger, illness and poverty. I am grateful for my family and friends who love and support us.  My intentions for next year?

More space for love, less attention to convention. May the Wild woman roost in my comfy chair permanently.

May we make a peaceful world in this lifetime.   Thank you for reading yet again.

Solstice is deep within and dark without

Sit quietly, let it work on you