I've tried unsuccessfully to think of a single word to encapsulate 2019. Words could sputter out of me to describe the world scene this year, but my little individual journey through those events was -- what? -- "paradoxical"? For the moment that works best.
The year started in my beloved England, only a broken wrist left me so battered and timid that I couldn't run around and experience all the things I had planned. The visit included almost no church music, but oddly, many blessings and more of a sense of rootedness there than ever.
And yet when the time came to an end, I uprooted again, back to Duluth, my American "as close to home as I can get." I found temporary housing in a beautiful place that slowly revealed itself to be uniquely challenging. Blissful summertime walking on the beach probably led to a painful IT band injury. Then a series of severe winter storms made the city nearly unnavigable at times. Walking around and getting into city buses, etc., has been as challenging as at the beginning of the year, only in a different place and for different reasons.
Human connectedness has made all the difference in 2019. Yet in another painful paradox, I seem to have lost the long term friendship that means the most to me, and I really do not understand what happened. Thus Christmas brought a lot of grieving, the processing of losses and closed paths. I have too rarely allowed myself to reach, much less feel, the deepest pain of life, so perhaps that was a good thing.
I end the year house-sitting, a quiet being in the quiet frozen North, hearing the roiling surf of Lake Superior as it changes the beach landscape irrevocably with every wave. Perched, not planted, as usual, and yet something feels different. I feel somewhat more inwardly rooted, somewhat less dependent on conditions. Maybe the paradoxes and ironies of life are slowly morphing into "mysteries" as I hit my mid-sixties.
May the next year, for all of us, be "mysterious" or better!
