A new year...

As we turn the page onto 2012, I realize it has been nearly a year now that I've been tuning into this space periodically to record the goings on of our lives, document some of my creative pursuits, and reflect on some of the wonder of our daily rhythms. It has been a year of great transition and growth; deepening of old traditions and creation of new. And the coming year no doubt holds even more growth and change, most imminently with the babe that we await; it is close enough now that if I don't respond to a phone call or some other correspondence quickly enough, friends excitedly assume baby has arrived. Nope, not yet.

We celebrated our transition into this new year with a tradition we began one year ago. Inspired by Sarah Ban Breathnach's Good Riddance ceremony in Mrs Sharp's Traditions, we sat down by the fire and unsealed our lists of "things to bring into 2011" that we had created a year ago on December 31, 2010. Not resolutions, more like written verbalization of things we'd like to call into our lives, turn our attentions and energies towards in the new year. It was interesting to see both the things we still hold close to our hearts and those things that maybe have fallen by the wayside and seem less important to us just a year later. Naturally, Will stuck to our 'rules' and limited himself to 10 pretty specific items; myself, well, let's just say I couldn't resist adding things like "joy!" to mine - which led to a page entirely covered in my scribbles (a few more than 10).

After some reflection on our successes (and shortfallings) with respect to our lists, we turned our attentions to those things from 2011 that we felt ready to let go of - our good riddance lists. I see this as somewhat akin to the Taslich ceremony that falls at the time of Rosh Hashana (the jewish new year), in which participants symbolically cast away into a flowing body of water those things they would like to remove themselves from. I'm grateful that it was quite easy to keep this list limited to 10 items. Once our lists were complete we offered them to the flames and watched them shrivel into black carbon ash. Good riddance!

Finally, we thought ahead to 2012 and all that we wish to call into this new year of great, unknown possibility. I find a certain excitement comes with sealing a document with sealing wax, knowing that it will be safely hidden through another 365 days of change - to muse on the possibilities of these next months and then let go of them as we step forward in reality.

I caught the last three seconds of the ball dropping and called it a good new year. True, we live in central time zone now - but on that night at 9 months pregnant, 11pm was all this mama could handle.

I wish a belated happy new year to you and would love to hear about the traditions that carry you in transition to another year. I look forward to another year of sharing in this space whenever I can. I am so grateful that you join me here.