New Year's Eve

December 31, 2014

 Sit down to record on the last day of the year without, truly, much of the summarizing or reminiscing impulse. Forging ahead, I tell myself. Prying myself from 62 after 24 years and coming here, a better residence in every way, is the big story. My own reaction amuses me, though, for I recognize a certain reluctance to be fully pleased, lest the universe decide I need to pay for my contentment with some unforeseen tribulation. I can barely contain the excitement I have at seeing what my first full spring will look like here, after the planting I have done. Seattle, Vienna, Budapest, less traveling than I would have liked, but I wanted time to curl up and know my new house, dig the fresh dirt. In the long passionate, agonizing affair with God, I found a way to block him, or at least the pain he causes by what appears to a mere mortal as cruelty, and betrayal. It is to trade heroic love for peace, something I spent fifty decades willing myself not to did, and yet, finally, did. One can weep only so much. One can wait only so long. If there must be faith on one side, there must be a little pity–or honor–on the other. Betrayed at love, one finds a way to render the bitter weapons of the lover harmless, and moves on. This is the core of Eastern religions, and I never recognized it until I lived it. Even now I entertain a voice back in the convolutions of the mind whispering, “it must be how He wanted it.” –having not, I suppose, utterly let go.
   
When I think of the faces of the year, I think of S, I think of the singers at the Kodaly whose earnestness and application were not, I understand now, American. Maybe I would say it was Magyar if I knew more. I think of B, who has the courage to call himself an asshole but doesn’t quite realize he really is one– self-recognition without the will to reform. I think– well, the images shift like the surface of waters.
    I must have written something. I can’t think now what it was.
    – writing amid the outsized bouquets in the hotel in Seattle
    – crossing the Danube bridges
    —Medea with my students
    –-watching the movers carry my possessions through the swirling snow
    ---sitting in darkness in my walled garden, weeping such tears that would have turned a heart of stone.
    –the various musics
    –the dreams after which I woke smiling
    – the big flower with white petals in starlight, which is what I see now when I close my eyes.