Courage is fear that has said its prayers. 

~ Joyce Mayer

Possibly, but I need to think on that.

The days pass and tomorrow Julia and I will leave Brooklyn and head back to Madison.  I have started writing  few posts and either taken on longer topics that I could write in a short session or I find much better things to do.  Like talk to Cheshire.  Like watch a movie.  We have been busy -- museums -- Brooklyn and The Tenement, a show, cooking, visiting, and Les Mis -- but everything on a low gear.  Cheshire and Chris recovering from a stressful semester in grad school, Julia and I just recovering.

And now it is 10 in the morning and I have to get Julia up and her day started.  Soon.  We are all enjoying sleeping late.  I am sleeping later than I have in a very long time.  Of course, not going to bed before midnight.  Or 1.  Julia loves the lie ins, but has an incredibly tough time getting to sleep at night.  Once again, I had hoped to get her remaining sores healed.  Finally and completely.  But it has not happened this week.  She is still peeling her right heel and scratching scabs on one arm.   I am going to mount the effort again once at home.  Having her sleep in my bed and staying in med with her until she sleeps until school starts.  

To bullet point the time:

• started work on 2013 resolutions.  Some of it just repeating last year’s for sure but some for new, some rephrased.  I have less to give up, more positive activity and contemplation, and each to do verb is attached to the adverbial phrase ‘with intention.’

• being with Cheshire and Chris, like being with Lisa puts me face to face with loneliness.  I sent up the intention to live closer to someone whose roots have mingled with mine.

• the Wednesday before we left for NYC, during Crane meditation, I was following the simple movements when I felt, for the first time in two+ years, that my whole self was in my body.  It was a whoosh of realization although I have the feeling that there has been incremental gains over the past month or so.  And the feeling has stayed.  Another veil or haze of grief has been released and I can stretch into my full physical self.  Impossible right now to explain the feeling -- so physical, so mystical and spiritual.  So ordinary, really.  It was as if I suddenly realized that I had been hovering above my body, observing and directing but unable to truly touch the full physical impact of my experiences.  Is it because now, finally, the physical experience is not as excruciatingly painful as it has been?  Like holding a hand just beyond the hottest part of the fire and then getting the ability to grasp the flame and survive.

• possibly because of this feeling of being “in my body,” I spent a very low morning on Christmas eve.  I felt very sorry for myself.  Being in NYC reminded me too much of being here in 2010 and I felt bereft of familiar anchors to hold me steady.  And I could see how Cheshire was carving out her Christmas which includes the large and loving family that Chris is a part of.  I did not feel like I could melt into Cheshire’s plans -- Julia’s needs and challenges put demands on the structures of time and make melting into any social situation impossible at best.  For moments, I wanted only to escape the facade of a happy holiday and let Cheshire go into a family that is enjoying some simple joys of the season.  I could give her Christmas with Chris’ family and not cling to our holiday together.  But Cheshire and I talked, we cried, and we spent the late afternoon traveling into Manhattan for a glimpse of the big Rockefellow Center tree and ice rink, and Saks windows, and St. Pat’s chapels.  We went to Chinatown for soup dumplings and tofu curry and green tea ice cream and home again on trains in the rain.  

• this is the year of beginning again to find what we will do on Christmases to come.  It has taken some time to accept that  but i can now.  

• I met an old friend, Steve, for dinner two nights ago.  He is one of those people who was long absent from my life, someone I lost track of as we moved west and my experiences seemed far removed from his.  But he is one of those people with whom the connection is immediate and deep.  We met at a little restaurant on the lower east side and caught up and told stories and traded ideas about writing, work, art, life.  Of course, always life.  He is more exacting than I am -- he is taking photos and his photos are like his art and his poems.  I see something in what he is doing that I want to cultivate -- not the taking of interesting photos or the writing of poetry, both of which are mysteries to me -- but the cultivation of inspiration.  That is what I will take for this year.   

• Lisa and Michael came up to go spend the day with us.  To go to the theater and take a meal together and to talk.  How much more is there to say of family like this?