{"id":4675,"date":"2012-12-31T21:06:08","date_gmt":"2013-01-01T02:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/Trees\/?p=4675"},"modified":"2013-05-03T20:11:58","modified_gmt":"2013-05-04T01:11:58","slug":"a-thousand-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/Trees\/?p=4675","title":{"rendered":"A Thousand Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

December 31, 2012<\/strong>
\nMonday<\/strong><\/p>\n

What can be said in New Year rhymes<\/em>
\nThat’s not been said a thousand times?<\/em>
\n— Ella Wheeler Wilcox, 1850-1919
\nAmerican poet<\/p>\n

\"holi12badge-snowman\"I’ve spent several hours over the last few days reviewing my year by reading my entire handwritten journal (410 pages this year), plus about 50 pages in the handwritten project diary I started keeping for my novel-in-progress when I got back from Bread Loaf. This was part of the Not-So-Big-Life Year End Ritual<\/a> I found last year but did not complete. Actually doing it this year counts as an achievement for me, since I’ve been saying that my six-word autobiohraphy should be “She never finished anything.”<\/p>\n

Reading this material, a haphazard chronicle of events, facts, prayers, quotations from my reading, fiction exercises, notations about the time and temperature when I sit down to write, I discovered some things (I read more than I thought, mostly short stories) and was confirmed in some things (the dislocations that began in September derailed almost all of my best-laid plans).<\/p>\n

And here I am on New Year’s Eve, the next-to-last day of Holidailies, having wobbled in that as well but happy that I had more enthusiasm for it than I had last year. Two pieces were chosen as “Best of” pieces, and that makes me very happy.<\/p>\n

The graphic below showed up on a friend’s Facebook feed this morning, and I have appropriated it. The Christmas balls are in the very colors that I use to represent my Six Goals of a Quality Life<\/a>. I’ve written them down for what seems like a thousand times. Here’s to one more chance to get it right.<\/p>\n

“The new years come, the old years go,\/ We know we dream, we dream we know,” writes Ella Wheeler Wilcox. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it a thousand times more: Thank you for reading, so much, so often.<\/p>\n

\"2013Goals\"<\/p>\n


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