I have Monday through Wednesday off so I’ll be back Thursday. Be kind to yourself this coming week; even if you like the holidays, things can be overwhelming.
1. It’s the winter solstice today. We made it through the darkest part of the year. (I have to say, taking meds has made my SAD nonexistent this year, and it’s been great.)
2. Here’s Anne LaMott on hope, in an essay for National Geographic, and it’s a good one:
Everyone I know, including me, has lived through devastating times at least twice, through seemingly unsurvivable loss. And yet we have come through because of the love of our closest people, the weird healing properties of time, random benevolence, and, of course, our dogs.
At regular intervals, life gets a little too real for my taste. The wider world seems full of bombers, polluters, threats of all kinds. My own small world suffers ruptures…that leave me struggling to stay on my feet.
In these situations I usually have one of two responses: either that I am doomed or that I need to figure out whom to blame (and then correct their behavior). But neither of these is true. The truth is that—through the workings of love, science, community, time, and what I dare to call grace—some elemental shift will occur and we will find we are semi-OK again. And even semi-OK can be a miracle.
3. And here’s Beatrix Potter’s “The Tailor of Gloucester” online, in case you need to read a Christmas Eve story about talking animals and sewing (aka the BEST Christmas story).
