Tomorrow night there will be another full moon - a blue moon. I wanted to photograph the ‘once in a blue moon’ moon, but it's hiding behind clouds tonight. Every twenty years in December there are two full moons. And I started thinking about who I was 20 years ago. I looked at a twenty year old photograph of me and I recognized myself, but I couldn’t immediately recall what was important to me then – my dreams, my worries; what made me laugh, what made me weep. The day-to-day stuff of who I was two decades ago was lost. Oh, big occasions could be recalled with a sharp memory jog of photographs or songs or specific dates of birthdays or anniversaries of marriages or divorces or moving house or deaths. Those were the peaks and valleys, but the paths that led to them – the days and weeks and months of the usual day-to-day routine stuff - were long overgrown and neglected. With a little judicious pruning, I could probably recall an average Tuesday afternoon in 1989. But I didn’t. All those minutes and hours and days and weeks and months of living have led me to this moment. And who I am today, still flawed and fallible, is someone I not only recognize, but have come to appreciate.
And so the new year is peering around the corner much like Missy was peering around one of the table-top Christmas trees on the bookcase. Slightly out of focus, slightly mysterious, but still piercing and strong and ready to reveal itself when the time is right.
Happy New Year to all my blogging friends and their families and friends. May 2010 reveal itself to be a good and compassionate and beautiful year.
