Eventide

  

2025 Word of the Year: EVENTIDE

Eventide is my favorite time to walk, to contemplate, to dream, to wonder.  It acts as a buffer between the day that's happened and the night that's not yet here.  Often we are treated to quite a spectacular, colorful array in the sky and more often than not in my subdivision, I will see deer grazing before the moon and starts are their only light.  It's a time of peace and oneness with the universe.  I always feel so connected on these walks.   I often walk with music, but when I don't the nature sounds provide a peaceful cadence as I wander. 

In my mind's eye, eventide also has metaphorical applications that transcend just a point in a day.  It can be a transitional point in time that captures the feeling of being neither fully one thing nor another. Ambiguity is not my love language but I am learning that I can power through when necessary. The last year has taught me well.  Katherine May wrote an incredible book, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times,  that spoke to me so much during the pandemic and continues to be a  framework for my days. Two of my favorites are below:

“There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world, and sometimes they open up and you fall through them into somewhere else. Somewhere Else runs at a different pace to the here and now, where everyone else carries on. Somewhere Else is where ghosts live, concealed from view and only glimpsed by people in the real world. Somewhere Else exists at a delay, so that you can't quite keep pace. Perhaps I was already teetering on the brink of Somewhere Else anyway; but now I fell through, as simply and discreetly as dust sifting between the floorboards. I was surprised to find that I felt at home there. Winter had begun.” 

“We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.” 

2025 will be another year of the in-between.  We will be relocating to the Raleigh, North Carolina area at some point after seventeen years in Missouri.  The last two months have been spent deconstructing my studio, making staging decisions,  and finding new homes for many of my favorite supplies.  I also discovered that the beginnings of my adult art journey meant so much more to me than I anticipated as I was preparing to purge.  The early days produced some tears.  At last count, I have 30+ studio boxes packed with a few left to go.  Many of my studio furnishings have gone to new homes to people who are themselves betwixt. Our daughter and son-in-law came for the holidays and helped us fill a 3,000 pound dumpster with stuff in our basements in two days after Christmas. Soon I'll start on the other rooms in the house and in February the whole house will get new flooring. The draw in Raleigh is our Sams, more oncology specialists with options/trials for me, and less extreme cold and snow.  I hear there's a nice art scene as well. In the meantime, I've packed a crate of watercolor/gouache and some cross stitch to have out while much of the rest of the house goes into storage.  Stay tuned.

The dogs are baffled as to what's going on, but all they really care about is going to class (agility training and trials) or running around like banshees.  Flapjack is now 11 months and Waffle is 4.  We'll be trialing here and then do the North Carolina circuit.  Nationals for Waffle are in Tulsa this year in March. 

 

Other 2025 newsworthy moments will be Jim's 40th work anniversary and our 40th anniversary trip to the Med with the Sams in May. I've been cleared to travel on this trip and am very excited. Who knows what else will come our way?  But for now, I am staying present and trying to see the smallest good and all the grace.  

“Wintering… is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can.”

 H A P P Y    N E W     Y E A R 

and may 2025 be a wonderful year.