New Year’s Resolution? Don’t.

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This New Year’s Eve, Claire and I will dance our fool hearts out to the great swing tunes of  sixty years ago, and we’ll dance into the new year.

January first, we will do what we have done each of the New Year’s Days of our relationship: we’ll sleep late, then do one of our several favorite forms of exercise, eat one of our (healthy) favorite foods, take a nap, and enjoy the pleasures of married life, not necessarily in that order. We used to take a dip in the cold ocean, but that doesn’t work too well here in Arizona. Our tradition is to start the New Year off together doing the things we look forward to doing all the coming year. It is for us, a long and honored tradition.

It’s good to have traditions for the New Year, but not all traditions are positive. One I have done without for many years is to make a New Year’s resolution. Here’s why:

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My Take On The Meaning of Christmas

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The gift of Jesus is what Christians celebrate at Christmas, but all too often, they too put the god of consumerism first. I don’t mean to criticize; it’s a cultural thing, and an economic necessity in our system of consumptive wealth-creation. It’s also so often a missed opportunity.

The Christmas story is an endearing tale, filled with subtle beautiful meaning, no matter your faith, or depth of belief. What a shame it is lost in the blur of shopping and wrapping, of Santas dropped from airplanes or delivered by fire trucks and worshiped by all.

Take time to imagine the journey of the Wise Men from the East, following a star, “…westward leading, still proceeding…” I’ve had the good fortune to pilot a sailboat hundreds of miles from land. After sunset, it can be tiring frustrating work to keep a compass heading. But when the ink black heavens are ablaze with stars, it becomes pure joy: look through the rigging, find a guide star, follow it and you will hold a true course. Should clouds interfere, you search for another guide star to hold your bearing.

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The New Homeless

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The dark blue late model Buick pulled carefully into a parking spot in the back lot of a Wal-Mart store. Powerful lights cast a harsh light, displacing the final glow of a weak March twilight as it faded from the peaks of the Sacramento Mountains in New Mexico. This night would be cold and long.

We watched as a smartly dressed Caucasian woman of a certain age emerged from the Buick, stretched her back and neck, and surveyed her surroundings. She didn’t look like the usual Wal-Mart customer. She wasn’t. She walked to the back of her car, opened the trunk and began removing items: a blanket, pillow, a grocery bag with what appeared to be snack food, and a bottle of water. Then she opened one of the rear doors of the Buick and began to arrange her bed for the night.

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We are sad for Gori, all of Georgia; we were there…

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Claire and I rode our tandem bicycle the length of the Caucuses. We spent a night in Gori, the town that Russians have taken. In another small town to the west, we were welcomed into a graduation party by a group of teens, watched them dance traditional Georgian folk dances, enjoyed the beauty of the town and surrounding countryside. The two girls and their mother (woman washing greens at the well) subsist in the countryside west of Gori; I wonder if they are safe, how terrified they must be. Our country’s misguided adventure in Iraq renders us impotent against Russia. They can do what they want to tiny (a few days across by bicycle) Georgia. What will they do next?

Left: President Bush visited Georgia not long before us. Right: Monument to hometown boy Stalin outside Gori.DSCN6880DSCN6875

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Have any of these people died?

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We are sorry Georgia. You were kind to us. Now that the the oil pipeline is finished across your lands, we don’t need you anymore. We hope the Russians don’t destroy the pipeline. We can’t stop them; we are otherwise engaged.