Edging towards the new year i am reflecting on the year past and setting intentions for the year to come. The year past has been some journey. I've come a long way from where i was on January 1st a year ago but the year has passed at a speed that has made it hard to assimilate. I have no achievements to proclaim. My growth has mostly been internal.
This time last year I decided to play/work with twelve fairy tales/fables/stories. It turned out to be thirteen as i miswrote the title of one which gave me two which is how things happen sometimes, a mistake creates a happy chance. These stories kept me moving and exploring through days that were dark and days that were less dark. 
Life is like a river, it keeps on going. I/we might cry "stop" but no, the river stops for no-one. It is unperturbed by our cries. When something momentous happens, a birth, a death, or a major change -good or bad - there's a before and after. The before is sort of known, but the after is all strange. Say that the momentous event is a good one, the change may outrun the capacity to absorb the experience but because it is lovely it's not too important, too much wonderful is rarely a cause for complaint, but say the momentous event is hard, then the immensity of it can be overwhelming and exhausting. 
I remember when i broke up with my older two children's father way back in the late 1980's. My son was three months old and my daughter just three. It broke my understanding. He was an oaf in the last months i lived with him. If i spoke to him he'd lift a buttock and fart at me or burp. His going was a relief. But it rained on my roses-round-the-door notion of happy ever after. My dream of  domestic bliss and a nice happy family was smashed. In truth we weren't and would never have been a nice happy family, he and i were cut from quite different cloth, but at 23 it was a shock, it wasn't meant to be like that, I had to change to accommodate the break up.  
As it's christmas time i'll throw in my thoughts on families as a by-the-by because it's a time when families gather. I think families are like strings of fairy lights, no matter how neatly you thought you had put them away the year before they always come out in a tangle. Families are unruly, and most of them seem to be a mix of mess and love and so long as the love outweighs the mess you are doing ok.
My break up from my older children's dad is a long time in my past, ancient history, but this year has been interesting in that it has thrown up a mass of memories. It's as if a switch was flicked when Jon died. Memories of him and our time together came flooding back, and with them memories of time before i knew him, time before i had children - a child, a teenager - and after when i was a young adult negotiating my pathway through the world. Houses i lived in, places i stayed in, people i knew, streaming through my conscious mind in glorious technicolur. I spent one month - August - jotting my memories down, for myself not anyone else, one day i'll pick up that notebook and re-read them. It was an attempt to recall as much of Jon as possible to stop myself forgetting, but with him and his garden came other gardens. With our roaming, our walks and small travelling came other journeys, other walking companions. And so on. 
Writing is slower than remembering and more difficult. Writing my memories made me cry. It was hard reliving the beautiful times i spent with Jon, and reliving the bad times, tho' they are part of his whole, and act as counterweight and keep his being real not romanticised, feels mean and sad and unhelpful when what i want to remember is the best of him and our time spent together not the worst. Maybe the bad is better buried with his bones, known but let go. Also my writing is too solid, committing thought to paper, to words, is frustrating, writing is a skill i have yet to feel free with. 
And all the time the river of life, "old man river", keeps on rolling, and whatever before and after you are living, the river throws up junk and obstacles, pushes aside yesterday to make way for today and tomorrow and tomorrow until tomorrow is yesterday. Day becomes night becomes day becomes night and so on, birthdays and anniversaries happen and yearly markers, Valentine's day, April Fools, Easter, Halloween and Christmas, days that have memories attached to them, April Fools day was our anniversary. Seasons pass.
Coming up, of course, is new years day. The new year inviting in the new. An open door, what now ? what next ? where to ? The need to set intentions and resolutions is strong in me if for no other reason than to have something to hold on to should the road be rocky, the waters choppy, the mountain steep. 
The past is done. I can wish things other than they are but my wishes don't make them so. My task is to live with what is and to make the best of it. I think most of us are doing that most of the time. Sometimes it can feel unfair. Some people seem to have all the luck, and others hardly any. I don't know how those inequalities can be amended because the luck of it is what it is. 
I think it's the Dalai Lama who says that it's how we respond to our fortune - good or bad - that gives us our way forward. I like that but responding well to falls and fails isn't easy and some people are awful when fortune favours them and they win. 
I end this blog with a nod to the past two months fairy tales. In November I was faced with the company of the obnoxious little brute that is Goldilocks. December gave me Little Red Riding Hood. How could it be that two little girls setting out on woodland paths might be so different and meet such different fates. And who did they become after their oft-told stories closed. This is what i am pondering in the last couple of days of 2018. I wonder if they met in future life who they would be. I guess that any one of us could be that little girl wandering and that it's what we carry forward that affects the rest of our lives. We know little of Goldilock's origins. In some stories she is an old vagrant woman does that change the way we see/meet her. Little Red Riding Hood steps out wrapped in her mother's love, the little red cloak/hood has to act as some kind of protection, and she carries with her food and tonic wine for her grandmother and a warning not to step off the path. She is also rescued. Perhaps in the light of her good fortune it's possible to see her journey-fellow Goldilocks with kinder eyes. Goldilocks seems so much of a taker but if you have little, we don't know if she does or she doesn't, then her need to satisfy herself, to eat, to rest, albeit at someone else's expense, is maybe born out of desolation and deprivation, her unloveliness is perhaps a reflection of a life lived as an unloved unlovable. 
Food for thought perhaps. Happy New Year.  

Back to my blog again. But why ? Why blog ? Who cares ? A year ago i was blogging out the first stages of grieving Jon. It helped. Having no-one to talk to about him, about my life with him, about my feelings, my blog page acted as an unquestioning friend. I did have real friends who listened to me too, and i was lucky in that, but speaking to a person is different to speaking to a page. 
The page acts as confidant, it is a pool of water reflecting back or responding to that which is given; a face inquiring, a tongue lapping, a stone breaking the surface, to drop through until it meets ground. 
Last weekend i blogged about feeling angry. Anger is not a pretty feeling but sometimes it is good, it is needed. It is part of being. Mostly we are taught to not give in to anger and keeping a lid on anger is good for social stability. Anger is an overbearing emotion, loud anger and silent anger create an oppressive mood. Anger ? Maybe call it rage. 
I remember when i was with Jon how his silent rage would reduce me to nothing, kept me dancing from foot to foot, het up with anxiety i would gabble to fill the silence which made him more furious. Yes this is the same Jon i have been grieving this past year. Sometimes this week i have wondered if he was worth grieving, if he was worth loving. But grief like love doesn't seem to follow reason it just is. I loved him for the good in him and stuck with him because i believed that the good in him was worth loving. I still believe that. But it doesn't make me blind to his flaws, or the flaws of any other i love. Only the new born seem to be perfect. New born babies. And I guess those who are new born to us. Those who are unknown can present their gleaming perfect self initially. Is this a drive that keeps the modern nomad moving ? A quest to find the perfect self reflected in new surroundings, new lovers, new friends, new, new, new ...
I've been thinking this week about how each of us is like a gobbit of energy, a bundle of cells made man, but within those cells is a quality of being. Last weekend i was an angry gobbit. This of course is what set me to thinking. I'd like to be a lovely glowing gobbit of loving kindness. What the hell ... i can aspire to that but would i really want to be that blank all the time. I think a gobbit of constant loving kindness might be like swimming in a sea of custard and never reaching land. Custard is nice but it's better with a sticky toffee pudding. And what about days when sweet is not the fancy, when sharp or tart is the flavour required, or salty, or bitter, you catch my drift. A mix of flavours will make up a balanced life. And each person is their own changing mix of flavours.
In traditional chinese medicine, as i have been taught and understand, the flavours relate to the 5 elements, water, wood, earth, fire and metal. These elements form a cycle, each one leads to the next and backs on to the one before, within the cycle there is a creative and a controlling cycle. A person or thing may lean towards a particular elemental quality but each element is within reach. 
If i go back for a moment to a person being a gobbit of energy then what i understand as our ancestral essence is formed at conception. The moment when two make one. That one is made up of it's two parent's being at that moment, the who they are, the life they have led to date, the life their parents and their parent's parents led and so on back to time long forgotten. The ancestral essence is set at that moment. 
Later as life runs it's course our surroundings and how we live life may affect the way we are. So  children soak in the atmosphere of their home or homes and the people who surround them. And later the same happens with adults as they choose with more discrimination and freedom the people they want to spend time with. 
One of the things that was making me cross last week was an ongoing dispute that is running along in my family. It's a rotten thing, there is no party that is all right and there are innocent victims. Frankly it pisses me off. In this instance I'd like a bit more custard with my sticky toffee pudding and i'd like a sharp white wine to wash it down with because the sweet is a bit cloying. Actually scrap the custard and the sticky toffee pudding i'll take just the wine and maybe some black olives and good cheese and an apple. 
What I'm saying is that my family and those who are family by extension are currently serving up a meal i find unpalatable. I have choices; I can walk away from the table, i can make do with what is served, i can bring what i want to the table - bring it and offer it to share, or i can brush aside everything on offer, destroy the whole meal, brush it to the floor with the sweep of an arm, or two, or throw the table upside down. Those are not the only choices they are just a few. Suffice to say the table is laid but it is not a currently good table.
I guess that a nation is also a family, the uk is currently all over the place with Brexit. I'm not really sure what to think. There are voices calling for this, or that, often in opposition and nobody listening to the other. And people being driven to despair because their hopes and dreams are being destroyed by someone else's hopes and dreams. And others, for whom it is all too much, shut up and keep quiet because the conflict is disabling and they know that in the end what they will do is make the best of whatever decisions those with whom power lies decide. It's a hot mess. 
That hot mess is my country. And i think the hot mess may in fact be humanity as a species. Selfishness has become such a dominant ideology that social co-operation has lost it's footing. Amongst small groups it is still happening but patterns of selfishness seems to be something all of us need to watch for in ourselves. 
This is something i was talking about with my younger son this week when he popped in to park his car in my front garden before going out to begin his christmas shopping. He is a wise and kind and also quite mischievous man and i value his opinions even when they differ from my own because i know there is deep thought behind them.
In a white trash moment i had posted on facebook that I hated everyone. The post was mainly a warning to the world that i was not in the mood for argument because my patience and desire to socially co-operate had run out. He asked me how i was and i explained to him that i was fed up about lots of different things, some personal and some political and none that i had any control over.
It was the weekend when Trump's troops were gassing children on the Mexican border, and the uk news-fronts were broadcasting that the metropolitan police were knocking kids off their scooters/mopeds as a way to stop them committing crimes. Yes i know thieving is wrong, but, if you live in a society where the needs of the poor are disregarded the poor will find ways that are less than desirable to make a living. Oh, and climate change continues to be a throw away problem. The majority of politicians seem to think they can ignore it because the change is relatively slow on a timeline that runs concurrent with their political lives, so they push it to one side as an ignorable issue. This stuff frustrates me. hence the anger. 
But the anger is also with myself, my own refusal to make changes, and my nearest and dearest, and those i know but don't love who really ought to behave better but don't, the anger is frustration at my selfishness and the selfishness of all of us. Our selfishness is a dark part of us that needs to holding in but too often seems to be lauded and praised. Wealth and high status are the pinnacles of achievement in modern culture maybe it has always been so but what is the real worth of those things set perhaps against the wonder of something that comes to us for free, the joy of sight, sound, smell, taste, touch. Too often those with the most seem to be terminally unsatisfied.
Each one of moves through this world, one little gobbit interacting with other little gobbits and each one of those gobbits has a responsibility to all the other gobbits, except that mostly it's too exhausting to think beyond the gobbits that are closest to us and so we look away when we see people struggling, or behaving badly, unless it directly affects us, even those who are close to us may be erased from our awareness. Indifference is a slight that can damage too.
And me, I am the same, and so my anger is me really shaking my own tree, asking myself how do i change to be a better version of myself, to grow out of my old tired skin, to find the new in me, because others will do what they want to, and i am not master of their being, but i am master of mine, and surely i can be better than i am now, not better than anyone else, but better than who i was yesterday if i choose to be. 

post script: regarding gobbits i am not sure what the dictionary definition is or if there is one but for me a gobbit is a bit like one of those really bouncy hard rubber balls, a dust mote, a star, and glob of something made of phlegm and flame.