2013

Happy New Year! As always, we’re starting our new year routines about a week late, because we were away with my family, leaving on Christmas morning and just returning Friday night. 

We’ve been visiting the same funny little island for more than fifteen years, and this trip was full of highlights: Henry learned to snorkel and Mac logged about hundred hours playing in the sand. We read great books and took long walks and ate conch fritters from Miss Roberta’s and drank Goombay Smashes at Miss Emily’s Blue Bee Bar. 

I love resolutions, the chance to start again, the framing ideas that guide our lives and choices. And I always look forward to our Christmas trip, time to think about the coming year. 

This year, though, I didn’t need to. I knew, in a very deep way, what I needed for 2013, because my life throughout 2012 announced the need for change over and over, and in more and more dramatic tones.  There were whispers in the spring, yelps over the summer, and then full-throated screams in the fall: it’s time to live a new way. It’s time to stop. It’s time for a change. 

I’ll be writing more about it in coming weeks and months, and like any big change, I feel the deep need for it but haven’t yet completely found the words for it. 

But this is what I know: I’m ready to change my life, to dig down into a new way living, in big and small ways. A friend told me once that getting older is like going through a tunnel, and you have to leave behind all sorts of things as the tunnel narrows. I’m ready to leave some things behind this year, ready to walk a narrower path, one of greater focus, greater sacrifice, greater risk.  

So much more to come. I’m still fumbling for the words, but these changes are ones I can’t wait to make. I can’t wait to learn this new path, and I can’t wait to walk it with you all.  

Love & prayers for a new year, for all the things we will gather up, and all the things we’ll leave behind. So thankful to walk it together.