Friday, December 30, 2011

A Catalog of Simple Wishes For The New Year


To enter each day expectant, and bow down to my dog with gratitude.

To leap and blow bubbles and reach instinctively for every bright, raging color in the crayon box.

To creep like an ecstatic cat burglar through every day and fling myself at the world.

To want more.

To whoop and bellow and grip the grass with my toes.

To look forward, and lunge.

To stomp through the calendar, oblivious, and to kill no clock that I don’t intend to eat with genuine relish.

To sense the planet moving beneath my feet, and to understand  that that motion represents both a state of urgency and an obligation.

To laugh until I cry uncle.

To want more.

To emerge from every dark place upright, unharmed, and blinking in the sunlight.

To imagine entire new constellations of planets, vast galaxies teeming with possibility.

To create a world of my own that allows me to live comfortably in the world I did not create.

To surround myself with the things I have saved from a lifetime of excavation and exploration, every one of which is a personal version of Proust’s madeleine.

To keep playing Twister with words until I find the right way to say the things I want and need to say.

To have pure, idiot wonder and faith in the limitless miracles of my body.

To want more.

To trust fully the things on which I can depend.

To be more dependable to the people on whom I depend.

To harbor none but exaggerated fears and the smallest of dissolving terrors.

To be hungry for nothing but something to eat.

To be forever trusting in the arms of mercy.

To get up when I fall.

To stand and run and never crawl again.

To recognize that I have been blessed beyond measure, and to accept my blessings as the expected, everyday miracles that they are.

To give thanks, nonetheless.

To want more.

To keep my heart open.

To listen.

To talk to strangers.

To stop what I’m doing –wherever I am—and take a good look around.

To reach out, to raise my voice.

To change my mind.

To know that I’ve done what I could.

To know that I want to do still more.

To settle down at the end of the day with good music and my inventory of pleasures and memories.

To give myself away until I’m empty and exhausted and left with nothing but the last radiant embers of satisfaction and contentment.

To believe that if this is it, it was not just enough, but more than enough.

To sleep and --not merely perchance-- to dream.

To have sweet dreams.

To want more.

To get up and try it all again.

10 comments:

  1. To want more--this may be the key to our happy lives. Thank you for all of your inspirational words.

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  2. I like this list of yours. It is genuine just like you and all the other stories you tell. I used to think you were the Great Man Of Wisdom, now I am sure of it.

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  3. Thank you both so much. And storyigrrl123, you wow me, but I am just a confused fellow with a dog who is trying his hardest to be a better person. And a better writer. You encourage me in both of those pursuits. And you are a dynamic songstress.

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  4. wow. just wow. and thanks.

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  5. soulful funny and clear --- the way to face the new year. thank you for some ideas to make my own. hope day 2 is going well.

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  6. Hey Brad, congratulations to both you and Alec. Unfortunately, there's no way I can have a closer look at "Conductors of the Moving World" here myself; it sure looks great from what I have seen and read on the net. A great start for 2o12, no? All the best.

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