A year is a long time. Hello.

Let’s call it a sabbatical, from the Hebrew, sabbath, a rest from toil, even though it really wasn’t that. It was a redirect: I toiled elsewhere.

I went to work, I came home. I got up at five every morning and wrote morning pages, and didn’t write anything else for months and months.

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I read books. Lots of books. Some were good. I liked Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act. Liked Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver.

A good one I started and failed to finish was Timothy Egan’s Fever in the Heartland. Kirkus calls it a narrative about America at its worst. They’re not wrong. It’s a history of the re-emergence of the KKK in the 1920s right here in Indiana. I put it down because it was breaking something inside of me and I didn’t want to be broken like that, not then, maybe not ever, even though the jacket cover told me the good guys win in the end.

I stopped reading when I realized, midway through, that even if they won, it wasn’t the end. Because here we are, a short century later, and a candidate for President is calling us vermin, and enough people are okay with that to have him leading the pack of contenders. By a lot.

What, you didn’t think he was talking about you?

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A few months into the year I helped my kid relocate to their new home a few states away. As I re-arranged the furniture to fill in the gaps left by their departure, I brought my easel back from its garage exile, set it up in the room that holds my dining table, my work desk.

For a few weeks it sat empty in its corner. Sometime in late summer I started painting again.

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I learned that my house has a name. Not a place-name like Monticello or Falling Water, but a name: Emile. Or Emil. It’s unclear which. I might have more to say about this at some point.

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Around the time I started painting again, I remembered I was supposed to be working on a novel. I now have what might (generously) be called a first draft. It’s terrible. I don’t care. It exists.

I listened to hours upon hours of interviews with Gabor Maté.

I feng shui-ed my interior rooms. I drew a daily Tarot card.

I talked out loud to Emile/Emil. Asked them how they felt about the new storm door, the new water lines strung across the basement joists. There is a language barrier, and no AI translator that I know of, but from what I can tell they’re indifferent to the storm door, though I suspect they’ll like it more in a month or so, when the cold weather comes and they notice the front room is no longer drafty.

They seem pleased with the water lines.

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I worked on letting go of my grievances. From the Latin, gravare, grave, to make heavy. Sharing a root with grief, which is everywhere, in multitudes.

Grievance is a burden. A grudge against the world, against what is, after all, just what is. Lay your burden down, say all the great spiritual teachers. Right there would be good. By the curb, where the trash truck can take it away on Wednesday.

Lots of Wednesdays in a year. Lots of opportunity to let that shit go.

Last month, over Thanksgiving weekend, I shuffled the Tarot deck, drew the Three of Cups. An invitation: celebrate with friends and family. So I took myself on a walk in the woods.

Today it rained, and the squirrels chased one another across the roof. Hello friends. It’s been a while.

_{image: wesselmanwoods.org}