goodbye old year

... you were an okay friend. I'll just...(cue song)

ack!

My year anniversary is coming up and I am celebrating it with Rosh Hashanah, Jewish New Year. I just don't make these things up!

Ha. Okay. So, I feel like I should probably update on something more concrete than these flowery feelings that just fill up my body and make me smile day in and day out, but it's just so hard to not share all those little buzzes that keep on keeping on - that literally drive me out of bed to teach, make me want to dance in the morning, keep me smiling until I leave the Planet of Happiness. I still cannot believe that I work at the Planet of Happiness.

But, I kind of don't want to because it seems boring and makes me want to fall asleep while I am typing.

good

How Come You Never Go There by Feist

“If you spend your entire life doing something, you should come up with resonating things that you know to be true,” Feist said. “You can just sing a ditty and not feel it. But when you feel a song, and you wrote it from a place that was honest — or was as honest as you were able to be at that moment — it keeps refreshing you.”

-"The Bounty of Solitude," Jon Pareles, The New York Times, 9/16/2011

dig

The past week has been wonderfully productive and exciting. Almost a full year has gone by since I landed in Ukraine and incredibly enough, it falls right at the best time of year. Now, I have spoken about Spring's magnificent ability to make all things fresh and renewed and grown - adding a flavor of beginning to all of the flowers budding and rain pouring and trees smelling and colors shining and sun warming.

And then this summer flies by and teaches me about how low I can go - really exposing myself to the deepest and darkest part of personality - a place where I let my guard down and throw everything away for just one more. I have officially spent a summer being a bum and I don't like it.

I picked myself up and made the last two weeks of summer count with friends and work, making sure that I ended a season with some idea of what I used to think about when I started this whole journey. And that's when tonight my friend told me that I am digging for something. And I think I'm a bit closer to hitting gold, or at least something bright. And I am pretty sure that I am happier now than I have ever been.

So here's to Autumn, the season which is giving me one more chance to start fresh in a way that speaks about letting go - all of those leaves are absorbing the summer sun and hopefully taking a bit of my summer as well.