everyday life

2015 in retrospect: October, November, and December

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literally the only picture of the four of us taken in this three-month period

Grace turned thirteen.  A teenager.  O.M.G.
Grace had a good cross-country season, and I was overcome, yet again, with the metaphors the sport presents.
We celebrated Thanksgiving with all of my father’s family.  It was wonderful.

My favorite posts:

Contentment
My writing life, and our only true zero-sum resource
A weekend of light and darkness
Stillness in motion

My favorite quote that I shared:

Ultimately, I see mindfulness as a love affair – with life, with reality and imagination, with the beauty of your own being, with your heart and body and mind, and with the world.
~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

2015 in retrospect: July, August, and September

IMG_7458We celebrated the Fourth of July with my parents, my sister, and her family.  We all loved having all the cousins together.

We picked the kids up from 3.5 weeks at camp.  We missed them when they were gone and it was a joyful reunion.

We spent a week on Lake Champlain, which has become a cherished tradition.  It was marvelous.

We spent Labor Day hiking to a Appalachian Mountain Hut cabin overnight with some of our dearest friends.

We celebrated our 15th anniversary with dinner the four of us.  I took some heat for that choice, but it felt absolutely like the way to mark 15 wonderful years, and we loved our dinner.  The photograph above is from that night.

My favorite posts:

Excited and sad at the same time
The Second Half
Do people still read blogs? 

My favorite quote I shared:

I hope you’ll discover, as I have, that its not what lands you in the dark woods that defines you, but what you do to make it out.

– Joseph Luzzi, In a Dark Wood

2015 in retrospect: April, May, and June

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Grace’s hockey team won their league, and I had tears in my eyes watching them standing as the anthem played.

Grace played the donkey in the sixth grade performance of Shrek, and it was a triumph, enormously moving to watch.

Whit celebrated his 10th birthday by indoor skydiving, and I marveled at his courage and joy.

I had vertigo.  Terrible, terrible, terrible.

I celebrated my 15th reunion from business school.

My favorite posts:

The primacy of interiority
The season of amazement
Everything is changing
What’s next for me as a writer?

My favorite quote I shared:

As for me, I see both the beauty and the dark side of things; the loveliness of cornfields and full sails, but the ruin as well.  And I see them at the same time, at once ecstatic at the beauty of things, and chary of that ecstasy.  The Japanese have a phrase for this dual perception: mono no aware.  it means “beauty tinged with sadness,” for there cannot be any real beauty without the indolic whiff of decay.  For me, living is the same thing as dying, and loving is the same thing as losing, and this does not make me a madwoman; I believe it can make me better at living, and better at loving, and, just possibly, better at seeing.

– Sally Mann, Hold Still

2015 in retrospect: January, February, and March

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Whit turned ten in January.

We had heroic, apocalyptic snow in Boston.  That coincided with my annual crazy month at work in a way that made February feel totally separate from real life.

We went to Paris with my parents and my children in March.  I love traveling with both my parents and Grace and Whit, and seeing them together on the street where I lived as a small child was indescribably powerful.

My favorite posts:

Her wounds came from the same source as her power
The increasing vulnerability of right now
A blur of otherworldly white
Parenting a tween: an exercise in presence

My favorite quote:

If we want to know what it felt like to be alive at any given moment in the long odyssey of the race, it is to poetry we must turn.  The moment is dear to us, precisely because it is so fugitive, and it is somewhat of a paradox that poets should spend a lifetime hunting for the magic that will make the moment stay.  Art is that chalice into which we pour the wine of transcendence.  What is imagination but a reflection of our yearning to belong to eternity as well as to time?

– Stanley Kunitz