Today was exactly what a New Year's Day should be. I slept in a bit and woke up actually feeling refreshed for the first time in a very long time. I made potato pancakes for lunch and got to share them with three lovely ladies. I spent the afternoon reading The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels and drinking tea. I flipped through some old magazines. I went to Sephora briefly. I caught up on reading blogs. Bean and I watched a movie. It has been a beautiful start to the new year. It was also the first time all break that I genuinely felt like I was on a Christmas break. It was such a busy few weeks with appointments and work that I never felt like I was actually able to breathe. Today was beautiful. I just relaxed. This is not something that I'm good at, but is something I've truly been craving. I am definitely not ready for school to kick back into gear on Monday. I could deal with a few more days like today.
This little phrase is screen printed on the bulletin board in the Starbucks by my parents'. It caught my eye when I was in there with Gabby a couple years ago, so I took a picture. Every so often I come across it and think I should drink wonderful things and relax more often than I do.
I am so ready to say goodbye to 2010. It was long and difficult year for me. Yes, there were some good things, and yes, the tough stuff almost always led to personal growth, but that doesn't mean I want to go through another year like this one. I have a good feeling about 2011 though. I'm going into it with a positive attitude.
I hope you all enjoy celebrating the New Year and I wish you all a blessed 2011.
Generally I do almost nothing for New Year's Eve. I am usually at my parents' house so my mom makes some snacks and we hang out and play board games. I'm not there this year though so a couple of my friends are coming over here and then we are...well...we have no idea what we are doing. We are all the "non-existant New Year's Eve plans" kind of people. We have come to discover that having three people who haven't made New Year's Eve plans in over twenty years attempt to plan anything to do on New Year's is kind of a bad idea. Oh well. We will come up with something.
If I had my druthers this picture describes somewhere that I think I would love to spend New Year's. The Rex in Toronto. I adore that place. So New Year's there? Yes, please.
Michaela forgets her body for hours at a time. I love to watch her while she's thinking or reading, her head leaning on her hand. On the floor or in a chair, her limbs abandoned to gravity. The more intense her concentration, the more abstract the problem she contemplates, the further her body roams. Down long roads, her legs swinging, or across open water, her hair wandering down her back. This is her body's truancy, its mischievousness. Freed from Michaela's disciplining mind, it runs away, goes outdoors. When she looks up and catches me watching her, or simply stops reading - "Jakob, Hawthorne actually pretended to be ill so he could stay home and read Carlyle's essay on heroes" - her body is there again, reappearing suddenly in the chair. And I feel deep appreciation for those heavy, sneaky limbs that have defied her mind's authority without knowing. She looks at me, all presence. While her body and I share our delicious secret. (Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces)
I just started Anne Michaels' second novel, The Winter Vault, today. I am not that far into it yet, but so far it is every bit as strikingly beautiful as Fugitive Pieces. I read Fugitive Pieces in one of my classes last semester and fell in love with Anne Michaels' writing. There were moments last semester where I profoundly struggled with the question of why I am doing what I'm doing with my life. It is writing like Anne Michaels' that reminds me of the answers to this question.
The above quote is one of many from Fugitive Pieces that float through my mind, haunting me, weighing on my very soul in the best way possible. So much of our class discussion of the novel centred around love; I even wrote my final paper on the connection between language and love in the novel. I find Jakob's description of Michaela as she reads incredibly beautiful. Perhaps this is partly because I too have a wandering body. I will stop reading only to find myself sitting in a chair at the coffee shop in one odd position or another and I always wonder if people have been looking at me. I think if someone watched me with Jakob's intensity, and with his deep affection, I would be won over. Now that I've written that I realize that it probably sounds weird. Oh well. What can I say? The way to my heart is through literature.
I don't really have that much to say lately. Well, that's not true. I've been talking and thinking through some stuff, but I feel like somehow it isn't formulated enough for me to write about on here. So, instead I bring you a pretty picture. I like the tiny delicacy of the rose bud contrasted with the solidity of the boulder. I also really like the colours in this. The yellow of the rose is so interesting, saturated yellow that fades into the faintest hint of colour at the tips of the petals.
