after enlightenment, the dishes

This New Year’s, I’m not in the mood for retrospectives, for listing best or worst, for naming the things that I did or that happened to me in 2009. Not keen on taking the time to send off the old year.

Neither am I in the mood for resolutions, for naming things to do or goals to reach in 2010, for shaping the new year while it’s yet raw and unformed.

The more I protest, the more I start thinking, maybe these lists of old and new serve a purpose. Maybe they structure our memories and our hopes; maybe they structure the very turning of the year.

So, despite not being in the mood, I’ll give it a shot.

In 2009, I:

- Acquired a dining-room table and set it up (with chairs!) in the dining room. This meant that not only does each room of the apartment have actual, functional furniture in it, but also I could conceivably have long chats with someone over coffee, or host dinners. (That part didn’t happen, unfortunately. We ate our small family Thanksgiving dinner, Yule dinner, and maybe one other dinner there, and the rest of the year it held clutter.) Whether it was well-used or not, it was important to me to create a space for Craft conversations and feasting, and I did that.

- Angsted rather a lot over my professional blog and ended up all but abandoning it, spreading myself over LJ, Dreamwidth (brand new in 2009!), there, here, and Facebook. Overall posting went down, too.

- Survived a third round of layoffs at my place of employment. I’ve worked at the same place for more than three years now, and (mostly) expect to continue there through 2010.

- Attended my second-ever Pagan festival and danced at a drum circle for the first time. (I was so worried about this that I researched it before I went.) Though it was profoundly transformative for me, I never did write about the experience. In a similar vein, over the course of the year I participated in several rituals that grew my practice by leaps and bounds. Reading is really not the same as doing.

- Shifted into a caretaker role for The Hubs during a particularly bad MS exacerbation, which culminated in a neurologist appointment and a five-day hospital stay for him. I was Superwoman for a couple of months, and it forced me to shed a lot of the fear and trepidation I’d had about things like grocery shopping by myself, being home alone at night, and speaking up for what I need (or what The Hubs needed). At the end of the year The Hubs was awarded disability income and shifted into writing full-time.

- Formally left one of the two Blue Star groups I belonged to. Leaving this group was a graduation of sorts for me. It’s where I first encountered Blue Star and first met an awful lot of people (both in Baltimore and in the tradition). My departure meant that not only had I forged enough relationships on my own to sustain me away from the group (especially since my other group, and my teacher, are long-distance), it also meant I could see when a situation was not useful to me and leave it gracefully.

In 2010, I will:

- Move, somewhere. We now live on the third floor and The Hubs needs a place without stairs. We’re looking at a place in the suburbs; we may not get this particular house, but I’m sure we’ll be living somewhere other than this apartment at the close of 2010.

- Find a dentist and get my teeth regularly cleaned/looked at. (They’re hurting me now, probably because I haven’t seen a dentist in a couple of years.)

- Learn to handle scary and stressful situations gracefully. As my stressors mounted this fall, I panicked more. I spent so much time grumping around, hiding in my favorite escapes, and gritting my teeth that I was scared to exhale, lest some other boulder drop. It’s no way to live, hunkering down like that. I’m sure 2010 won’t be all sunshine and roses, so I’ll spend the year practicing better coping mechanisms, breathing out as deeply as I breathe in, and not staying quite so tightly coiled up.

- Become a Blue Star Neophyte. I spent a lot of 2009 scared of this Rite of Passage and its subsequent life changes, but I came through so much that year, I’m now confident I can make it through whatever Neophyte has in store for me. (This isn’t necessarily a practical goal to list, because my teacher and others are planning the ritual and its timing, but I’m also confident that a suitable time will present itself in the next year. For my part, I will take the first available opportunity.)

- Keep track of the books I finish for the 50-Book Challenge. Reviews are optional; the list itself isn’t.

To borrow a toast from Thorn Coyle: here’s hoping that 2010 is a year of love, joy, prosperity, knowledge, and great sex!