New Year thoughts

As is typical at the end of the year, I’ve read/ watched/ heard a lot this week about “starting fresh” in 2014 – and at other, more important, life-markers. This is the first year that I have noticed the theme of forgiveness as a January 1 ritual – in a TV interview with a psychologist and in several pieces I read on the Internet. I don’t subscribe to the theory that a Yom Kippur-style cleansing is needed to go from one calendar year to the next, so I’ll try to dispense with that notion and then go on to my own transition from ’13 to ’14.

Another word about the World Death Rate (100%)

My friend John Schappi’s blog post today about death and dying prompted me to go back and write down a post I thought through but couldn’t get out during my recent period of writer’s block. My brain worked overtime on this subject a few weeks ago when my mother thought she had had a stroke. I wanted to write it down and make it public because of her admonishment to me at the time – “no tubes; just remember that.”

death

Thinking of Cindy

Rock Creek in winter I could not, for some reason, bring myself to go to a memorial service today for someone I worked with for nearly 30 years. Instead, I fell back on an “escape” from organized religion that I used quite often in my 20s – going to nature.