Happy New Year!

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese - harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver

I have a lot on my mind as we begin this new year, and look forward to sharing some of those thoughts with you over the course of the coming months. But today I am too tired from bringing in the new year to the fabulous sounds of James Hunter to write much. So I figured I'd share with you two pieces of writing that have been important to me. One is the Mary Oliver poem above. If you haven't checked out Mary Oliver, you should! She is an amazing poet.

Here's the other one I wanted to share -- it's by Arundhati Roy, an Indian writer and activist. She's most well known in the States for her book The God of Small Things.

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire but to lay seige to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubborness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness - and our ability to tell our own stories. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling - their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
Arundhati Roy

Many wishes for a kick-ass New Year filled with the love of family and friends, peace in this often violent world, laughter and joy, the will to keep up the struggle, and hope that another world is indeed possible. Much love, Susanna