Happy New Year - really?

Quite by accident I looked at my post from last new year's this week and almost cried. What a bittersweet year's end it's been. We had an extremely pleasant, centainly compared to how it's been lately, New Year's Eve - and this morning I spoke to my family far away. But far away is how I feel from last year's reach for optimism.

It seems selfish and insincere to celebrate in the tumultous shadow of the devastating tragedy of the south Asian earthquake and tsunami that has taken so much life and land from people who can least deal with it. And yet today on TV I saw some of the ravaged victims of nature's wrath lighting candles in a Buddhist ceremony of hope. So why is it that I can hardly find my candle, much less light it? My health is good, I enjoy my work, my family is well, friends and former students reach out to send me cards and messages of holiday joy. I should be able to weather a transition to another year, especially one that had a long dark inconclusive denouement where it seemed the very nature of being and belief faded into a complex web of unwelcome revelation, both political and personal.

So this a winter of the soul and it's snowing core assumptions that insist on being questioned. I know this to be the most productive exercise of detachment life has to offer and I've spent a lot of time like that as my curious path has unfolded. It's just a bitch while it's going on.

Maybe tomorrow I'll find how to express what I'm after...or it will find me as so often happens. Thanks for being with me while I write my way toward a new beginning. I feel a little better already.

Happy New Year. Sometimes newness comes in unexpected turns. I know that.