2012, A Review

The things I've forgotten far outnumber the things I remember. 

Perhaps that's the way it's supposed to be.

I remember it as a year when I could live just about any way I wanted to live, except at certain times when I was called to do things I wouldn't have done if I was living any way I wanted to live.

"There is life not of our time," Robinson Jeffers wrote in his poem, "Pelicans." It's the one line of poetry I remember reading this year. I remember Alice Templeton saying in poets' workshop how she wanted to talk about line breaks and thinking that would be a good thing to talk about sometime.

There were times when my childhood came back to me, mostly after watching after my Aunt Lois, 92, being a witness to her unique way of managing life by denying anything connected with death and so becoming a kind of child again. I had many dreams wherein my mother and father and I were interacting with my children and my children's children but I can't recall any one of the dreams with any specificity. 

Most of my thoughts ended up going nowhere, as did most of my feelings, but I'm glad I had them all.

As tempting as it is to look back, it's much more tempting to look forward and to celebrate an idea as odd as dromoscopy, the idea put forward by Paul Virilio that it's just as likely that the tree may be walking toward you as you walking toward the tree.

In the future, I musn't add things to things. I must deny the compulsion to add more to what I already have. It's enough, what I have, it's more than enough, it's more and it's never enough.