Promises to myself for the New Year.

I’m sitting at my desk in front of my computer listening to Beatles Radio on Pandora. What a gift it is to hear these old familiar songs streaming to me from the magic of the internet.

While Lennon’s ‘guitar gently weeps’, it’s easy to be melancholy on the last day of the year. Particularly when our region has is being smothered by a seamless blanket of clouds. Sunshine is just a faded memory.

Glimpse outside my window

Days like these we must find a way to light up from the inside out.

So I’ve decided to try and begin the New Year with some new resolve. There are always things I need to be more of; productive, organized, disciplined, thinner, fitter, smarter, kinder, and wiser.

I’d like to try a different approach this year and make myself some promises to:
1)Pay Attention
2)Practice Forgiveness
3)Smile More
4)Be Generous
5)Keep moving

I’d also like to share this blessing from Irish poet, author, priest and philosopher John O’Donohue.

“A New Year Blessing”
John O’Donohue
Benedictus (To Bless The Space Between Us)

On the day when
The weight deadens
On your shoulders
And you stumble,
May the clay dance
To balance you.

And when your eyes
Freeze behind
The grey window
And the ghost of loss
Gets into you,
May a flock of colours,
Indigo, red, green
And azure blue,
Come to awaken in you
A meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
In the currach of thought
And a stain of ocean
Blackens beneath you,
May there come across the waters
A path of yellow moonlight
To bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
May the clarity of light be yours,
May the fluency of the ocean be yours,
May the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow
Wind work these words
Of love around you,
An invisible cloak
To mind your life.