Musicians and singers; dancers, painters and sculptors, writers, builders of useful AND unusual things, stretch your bodies and ready your tools. It's time for you to go to work.
Yours are the products that steady our spirits, and soothe our souls.
And we are communally cracked, bouncing toward broken.
HAPPY NEW YEAR! ummm, happynewyear? ... wait, ... happy. new. year. --- not quite.
happy new year ... I guess that's the one.
happy new year...
2010 leaves "us" more unemployed, more homeless, more precariously positioned, more tentative, and more collectively ... blah ... than many of his earlier siblings.
And it is art that will ultimately restore our sanity.
This year I have reconnected with more people from my past than at any time in my life. I welcome each of you. I'm glad to have you back in my universe.
It is my sacred personal tradition to offer a comment on each departing and arriving year. This particular transition finds me lost for words -- but vocally so.
Most years this blessing is a call to the Universe for pleasant things to come your way.
Not this time.
This year, a call for YOU to stand up, dust yourself off, introduce yourselves to the neighbors, and get to work. We must rebuild.
There is plenty to do. And to quote the lovely Alice Walker, "we are the ones we have been waiting for" to do it.
With that, my 2011 blessing:
As the new year sparks to life, I wish re-ignition of the fire in your belly. I wish it to warm, then glow, then crackle, then consume the excuses that may have kept you on the sideline and ultimately burn outward as unquenchable passion to make a difference. THIS is the year we need you to make progress on that thing you were born to do.
I wish you toward a desire for introducing yourself to others. We can spare no quarter to anonymity.
First, because there are scoundrels and scallywags among us. And every time they sit a briefcase or bag beside their chair and walk away -- it shuts down the airport. We need to start figuring out who they are, so we can return to keeping our shoes on when we travel to grandmother's house.
More importantly ...
We are surrounded by people in pain; real, tangible, gut-shredding circumstance and situation. We need to put names and faces to these trials, and stop pondering them in the abstract. It isn't "the homeless," it is Bill, his wife, and the three kids living in their Civic.
THOSE are two very different problems.
I wish for you commerce. Create something. And sell it or trade it for something someone else has created. Then make something else, and repeat the process. A song, a bottle of wine, a meal, a painting, a table, a loaf of bread, a cut lawn, a colorful knick-knack. These are the seeds of an assembly line, then a factory, then an industry, then an economy.
Neither Washington nor your State capitol creates jobs. Those come from people with a tangible "something" to market. And a "strong economy" starts with the thing you created.
I wish focus for you. I bless you with an eye for finishing the things you start. These are not times to leave business incomplete. You will drown in a boat half-bailed, lose everything to a fire half-extinguished, and starve in wait for a meal half-prepared.
I wish for you language. Our melting pot is flavored with many spices, and we have degraded ourselves to complainers about the combination, rather than savor-ers of the flavor. I encourage you to learn a paragraph not crafted from the alphabet of your youth.
Hierdie jaar, leer jouself om te sê goeie môre in 'n taal wat nie jou eie.
Salve.
I wish for you an infinite supply of hugs and kisses. Not for your reception, but for your delivery. We need to resume touching each other. Texting isn't the same. It cannot replace a hug.
Artists: I wish your favorite muse to be captured at your side; rendered incapable of leaving you, and emotional in her captivity. I wish her to inspire you, cajole you, tease you, anger you, and propel you to your greatest works ever. You are our bulwark from these blahs. They would have us believe they are inescapable. You have the crafts to prove them wrong. First our survival (√) then our sanity ( ), then our stability ( ), and ultimately our success (!).
As always I wish you life, health, strength, a smile, great sex, a party, nutrition, a song, a good book, a circle of trustworthy friends, a cabal of wise counsel, a bushel bucket of hope, and a tougher tether to your elders and children.
We have lost many bright lights this year. People we admire and love have gone to the other side from every facet of public and many of our private lives. I wish this to remind you that ours is a temporary sojourn through this time and space.
We will not arrive the destination at the same time, but I wish us to all arrive "together."
happy new year ...
--Stew.
Photo: This year's photo is called "Father Time opens the gates of dawn which open upon the real world." That's not what I would have named it, but then .. I deal in words, not images. The artist's title DOES seem to capture everything he intended. If you like it, and want it for your living room, Art.com will be happy to frame it and send it to you.
