Does a "new" year really mean "begin now"? Now? In the present? All new? All fresh?
To quote the
brilliant George Carlin, "There's no present. There's only the immediate
future and the recent past."
For most of
us the recent past has been extraorinarily tough.
Hope is a longing and a desire for something to change for the better.
Hope can be helpful, but it can also be destructive if we
expect the near future to suddenly be much better by some magical or divine source. Perhaps, in
today's world, rational optimism might be better words to use.
Georgia
O'Keefe's biographer wrote about O'Keefe's "Ladder to the Moon" ....
"The images are all of transition: the ladder itself
implies passage from one level to another; the moon is cut neatly in half by the bold slicing light,
halfway between full and new; and the evening sky is in flux, still pale along
the line of the horizon..."
I hope, that
the Immediate Future - in the long months ahead - holds you kindly in her hands - and that you find many simple
pleasures and even some joy in each day.