Marking Time and Leafing Out

As the first six months of this rambling and rather pixilated place draw to a close, it seems appropriate somehow to reflect on what I shall simply call here "things".

On the November morning this blog came into being, I was on a brief vacation and had just learned I was retiring from the downtown law firm where I had spent many years — I was packing up the contents of my office and the Office Buddhas and lurching about in the chill grip of an icy paralyzing fear and not a little dismay about how life was developing, about where it would go from here and what would become of me.

Creating a blog was an exercise I had been thinking about for some time, but there had never been time to do so. Sitting down that first morning to a blank screen and a veritable symphony of white space was something of a daunting experience, and I wondered if I had any voice and what on earth I was going say here. Truth to tell, I probably sat staring at the computer screen for quite a while before daring to write anything at all. I was hoping to find a scribe or an artist somewhere inside myself (haven't found them yet), and these were to be my morning journal pages. Come what may, I would be here every single morning — I would write something and perhaps tuck in one of the digital images I had captured while pottering about.

Creating a blog was a way of saying farewell and maintaining contact with people I had known at work and had come to care deeply about, and I decided to share it all — the fear and trepidation of this newly retired state — the multitude of sleepless nights and self doubts — the minute details of the mundane activities which make up one's day — the careful observations of weekday doings in Westboro Village and weekend twittening in the Lanark Highlands — the small happinesses which appear in one's life like puffs of smoke and leave a lingering contentment behind them when they disappear.

This morning, I give thanks to deities great and small for the last six months and the ways in which this lifetime is unfolding: for clan and connection, for the great wide natural world "out there", for the old friends who stay in touch and the new friends made in this place, for the creativity, visual wonders and thoughtful words I encounter here every morning. Methinks that like the old birch tree on my hill in Lanark, I am beginning to leaf out again.