Getting Ready for 2024

I love calendars, schedules, and plans. 

Organizing my time is a pleasure, and choosing when and how to do thngs makes me happy. 

This year, 2023, has been a good year for me, my family, and my business. I have enjoyed my roles as college professor of English and writing consultant. I've devoted time to my own writing projects, including the creative non-fiction book I'm putting together out of my experiences as a back-to-the lander in the 1970s. 

My family members have prospered and moved ahead with their lives, and my business, the International Leadership Institute, benefitted greatly from our European visit in July and August. 

For 2024, my personal theme is hope. In years past, I've chosen love and faith as themes. These words have spiritual connotations that I have explored in various ways: through the arts (paintings, music, writing); through travel, and through personal relationships. Love and faith are now less abstract and more tangible to me, helping me understand the richness of these concepts and how I can express myself by means of love and faith. 

Hope is a bit tougher, as it seems I need to make a commitment to receivng and interpreting events that happen in my life in such a way that my hope becomes stronger and more effective. It's more passive than love, where I can start the ball rolling by being loving towards others and responding to their responses, initiating a cycle of love. It's less speciific than faith, which begins as a attitude of belief and trust in the innate goodness of life. 

 Here's a favorite poem: 

 “Hope” is the thing with feathers BY EMILY DICKINSON 

 “Hope” is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul - And sings the tune without the words - And never stops - at all - And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard - And sore must be the storm - That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm - I’ve heard it in the chillest land - And on the strangest Sea - Yet - never - in Extremity, It asked a crumb - of me. 

 ---from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University press, . . .  Reprinted by permissions of the publishers and Trustees of Amherst College. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42889/hope-is-the-thing-with-feathers-314