Happy New Year everyone!
If you like to make art from things found around you, check out the Olympia Dumpster Divers blog. Their January 1 post talks about making art from shoes and has a link to my shoes on the wires post.
I don’t usually make specific New Year’s resolutions, but tend to set general goals like “create art,” “write,” “notice nature around me,” “nurture relationships,” etc. I also feel that the start of a new year is like the first page of a new diary: fresh, clean, ready for me to write whatever I want.
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve kept a written diary or journal. Depending on the type of book, I used to fill several journals a year, but now I’m down to about one a year (if this still sounds like a lot of writing, you should know that I write big and messy and don’t get many words to a page). Every time I start a new book, I feel like it’s a fresh start in my life — like the start of a new year. I pause and think about what I want the theme of the new book/new year to be. It might be the year I move to Vancouver (1990), the year I get my first book published (2002), the year I travel to Japan (2006), etc. I’m not sure what the theme of this year will be. I have a few things I’d like to achieve in my personal life and in my writing, but the fact that we have to find a new place to live will be a big theme this year. I still don’t know when it will happen (some time within the next four months probably) or where we’ll end up, so I feel like I’m starting the year with an unseen page. Maybe 2008 will be a year of positive change. That’s what I’m hoping.
I’ll leave off this post with an image of the moon on Christmas Eve (not in great focus, as I was balancing my little Nikon Coolpix on a balcony railing). The huge halo around the moon is apparently due to the unusually close proximity of Mars (Mars was located to the right of the moon just within the halo).
wild ink 
January 3, 2008 at 11:09 pm |
Akemashite omedeto gozaimasu! That’s Happy New Year, sort of, in Japanese. If you want to know what the year will bring you it may have been revealed to you in your first dream of the year. That’s one of the beliefs out here. Not sure how to interpret mine. It was sort of surreal.
I’m sure you also know that this is the year of the mouse (in Japan) or rat, I think, in China (although their New Year doesn’t start for another couple of months). The mouse is a sign of prosperity because it is associated with bales of rice, a sign of wealth. The mouse is often also seen together with Diakoku, one of the 7 Lucky Gods, and he is a sort of patron god of business. So I’m looking forward to a prosperous New Year.
By the way, wonderful photo of the moon. Jean-Pierre