What will you do with your wild and precious life?

As we consign 2023 to a dusty storage bin in the attic and get ready to plunge into a heady affair with the new year, I took some time to consider the ragged edges of my mortality. It seems appropriate to quote the beloved poet, Mary Oliver, who asked:

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

What do I plan to do? I feel like I’ve already wasted 30 perfectly good years of my life…59, if you count all the years, but I cut myself some slack until the age of 29 when I should have known better by then.

So, now, as I wonder what to do with my remaining 20 years (30 if I’m lucky and 12 if I’m not and go the way of my mother and her sister), I can only regret that I choose as slow a career as publishing and came to it late in life. But since I did, times two, I would like to charge on, full speed ahead, and write as many books as I can…and hopefully get just as many published. For instance, one of my top wishes this coming year is for my agent to sell the picture book manuscript that includes, among other gorgeous bits of nature, a mackerel sky.

Another thing that I plan to tackle is finishing a few sewing projects. I’m not allowing myself to buy any more fabric from now on. Anything I don’t finish will have to be dealt with by my family and that’s not fair to them..

Same with my ginormous stash of yarn. It’s not like I’m not knitting; I usually have at least three projects going on simultaneously.

But with me being a slow knitter and my fiber hoarding habits legend–or at least it used to be; I no longer allow myself to buy yarn either–even with constant knitting, I doubt I will ever use up all the yarn I bought.

This is about 1/100th of my stash.

What do I plan to do with my wild and precious life? Besides nursing a lot of regrets with far too little alcohol, I plan to write, sew, and knit. Not wild, perhaps, but precious to me.

How about you? What have you planned for yourself in 2024 and beyond? Tell me.

Whatever it may be, I wish you joy and satisfaction.