Happy Birthday, Happy New Year

My echoing silence has been due mostly to the fact that I was down with the flu for a week...I am still tired and a little less than 100%. It all started on New Years Eve with the aches and the chills as I got the farm house ready for our New Years Bash...and so just like that, it is 2013. And I'm 26. Both of those things happened. 

    Never has there been a year that I have looked back on with such a quiet sense of satisfaction and thanksgiving. Apart from the fact that I married my very handsome, very loving husband, it was a good year. Things fell into place in an admirable way. I moved. I expanded my work. I met new people and made new friends. And now that we are on the thresh hold of a new year, its hard to imagine being able to 'top' last year in any way. 

Usually I do make resolutions. And usually I stick to them pretty well, because I am a very stubborn person. But this year I couldn't think of any, which is, I suppose, a good thing. There is nothing that I want to achieve for the sake of achieving it. I just want to maintain, and enrich. 

   Almost every year I read Little Women. It is perhaps my favorite book in the world-- a book that feeds my heart and my soul. I read it for the first  time when I was probably nine, and have been in love with it since. This most recent time reading it, I was struck by how hard the girls tried to be 'good'. And it occurred to me that that isn't something we really try to do anymore...our lives are so centered around ourselves, and what is best for us. But I think that in forgetting that striving to a higher goal-- to conquer those parts of us that hurt others, or ourselves, to battle with our natural inclinations to be unkind or selfish-- we have lost and are losing something that is so important. We are losing our ability to improve...not in a physical sense, by losing those five pounds or getting the perfect haircut...but in an internal sense. We tend to settle for what we have, and forget about it, as opposed to trying to deepen our ability to love, to empathize, to help others. So I guess this year, that's what I want to try to do...in any way I can. To better myself internally. To be kinder in my thoughts and my actions. To be more thoughtful in the way I approach life. To love more deeply...

Thankfully, I am married to a man that every day reminds me of how fortunate I am and makes me want to always work to deserve his love. And for that I am blessed.

Also, now I am officially closer to 30 than I am to 20. And that is tough.