I’ve probably written before about how much I live in my head and fail to pay enough attention to my surroundings, but something ragged and imperfect and gorgeous about these leaves caught my eye. The wabi-sabi-ness of them allures, like the tattered petals of peonies or chipped nail polish or the crackled glaze on an old plate. I’ve always been so intent on polishing my presentation, covering up my flaws, revising my past that I exhaust myself trying to be A Better Me. I shared some background about my bleak family life and childhood with a friend recently and admitted that I was tired of trying to wrangle my life history into a tidier narrative. One with quirky relatives and appealing redneckiness told with an eye-rolling shrug and wry tone of voice. It’s a relief to admit to myself that I’m chipped china and wind-blown leaves and crumbling stucco and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Remember how I said I wanted to go back to Mojo Graduate School? Today I took the first step. Sunday morning when I usually lie in bed til late afternoon, I got up, got dressed and took my books and journal to Starbucks. I had some external motivation because I was meeting a friend for lunch, but for almost three hours I read about alchemy, wrote in my journal and made notes in a new tablet, drank coffee, plugged in my headphones and pretended I was in Paris. Listening to Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concert transported me back to actual graduate school at University of Virginia, having dinner at my T.A.’s house, hearing this album for the first time while fighting him off as he tried to pull off my pantyhose (!). And when I resisted (I thought he loved my mind, not my ass!), he snubbed me the rest of the semester because I didn’t put out (why didn’t I?) and made me feel like the bumpkin I was. But he gave me the lasting gift of introducing me to that cd, one of my Desert Island Discs, and life gave me the gift of a year at a university where I was able to delve, unfold, investigate, explore and gobble up things I had never dreamed of in my little life in Kentucky or my battered life as a wife. It was a year of sadness and confusion and failure but also one of growing up, growing out, growing forward. Maybe it’s impossible to recapture that particular fresh, fertile mind, but today glows because what I was learning took over my Self consciousness and let me soar for a little while. I’m looking forward to back-to-school Sundays.

I’d love to be reborn as a lush full-blown amaryllis, bursting into the world with a personality as big as a shiny new 18-wheeler. Ready for days soaking up the sun and nights making love with the moon. With a mouth made for kissing and kissing again, I wouldn’t know the meaning of guilt, shame or regret. I’d never hold back, instead throwing myself into being with all the red in my veins, betting everything I owned on one explosive entrance — wearing my best dress, quivering with green and gold perfumed sap, batting my pollen tipped lashes. A beautiful broad who was born to bloom.

I try to choose a word each January to guide or inspire me for the coming year, and I feel a great pressure for it to be a brave or uplifting  or inspiring word. A word that tells the world I’m a kickass kind of woman. But sometimes I feel like I’m faking it. Yes, I would like to say that my word for 2012 would be FORWARD or YES or MORE, but I have to admit that many days I just feel small, stuck and confused. I want to be a Joan of Arc/Gloria Steinem/Frida Kahlo woman, but I am so often scared, little and insignificant even though I want to see more, feel more, do more, make more, be more. This year, I might take a step downward, go deeper into the darkness of little me instead of pretending to be superwoman. My word might be OPEN — scary in itself, because when you leave a door open, you don’t know what will come in or leave. A liminal space, a threshold, a place of ambiguity that ‘s difficult for someone like me who wants things to be black and white, clearcut, certain.

I dread grocery shopping, even when it’s someplace as seductive as Whole Foods, but the other day I took home more than a pricey pomegranate, politically correct bison burger or out of season heirloom tomatoes. When I was stowing the bags in my car, the setting sun lit up the sky in the parking lot for a minute or two, giving the clouds a rosy blush as it kissed the day goodbye. Just a tiny earth movie that I happened to witness. I’m sure they’re playing all over town, every day, all day, but I’m usually too caught up in the soundtrack playing in my head to take notice.

- for a tiny white Christmas

- for a guru to solve all my gadget problems and hook up my Sonos music system. Otherwise it will sit in the box until it becomes obsolete. It comes with a simple 3-step installation guide, and I’m already flummoxed. Generally, I have to call my daughter in California to have her walk me through any technology installation. So pathetic. My iPhone 4s is so complex that I’m afraid that next I’ll be reduced to using a Jitterbug senior phone.

- that I could lose the 7 pounds that crept onto my body as a result of my weakness for cheese, wine and anything salty. The only craving I haven’t succumbed to are Pringles, and I’m only a vacuum-sealed can away from that.

- that my family had started drawing names for Christmas years ago. It has been the most stress-free holiday ever. Does that sound Scrooge-ish? I’m an anxious gift buyer and I never seem to get it right while trying to make sure I give everyone the same number of presents so no one will be under- gifted . By the time it comes to unwrap, I’m a wreck. Focusing on one person soothes my ADD-ishness.

- that I were as funny and clever as the people who made Shit Girls Say. I feel like I used up all my clever a few years ago.

- that I could have a vacation for two — me and my Kindle — on a tropical island with room service.

- that I could stuff a handful of sea salt Good Karmals in my mouth and not face the inevitable calorie karma.

This photo, taken on a walk along the G.W.Parkway in Alexandria, VA, this month, reminds me of  Shakespeare’s sonnet 73, one of my favorites. I guess it’s kind of melancholy, but winter is in general bittersweet — the hibernation and dying off that makes new growth possible in the spring. I used to hate winter and can’t say I don’t whine when I have to go to work in the biting cold, but I also have a better appreciation for it since I spent last January in London and loved it. Loved bundling up, loved walking home in the dark, stopping to buy a cup of pomegranate seeds from grocery stall, the sacred seed that reminds me of Demeter and Persephone. I’ve been thinking today of things I love about the earth pared down and somehow pithier:

– Christmas lights on all the fire stations, especially the old brick firehouses in downtown Charleston. The two near my office are simply decorated with strings of colored lights outlining the contours of the whole building, and it makes me so happy to drive by them on my home at dusk or dark.

– Winter Song by Sara Bareilless & Ingrid Michaelson.

– Nars Space Odyssey silver glitter nail polish, in honor of light and tinsel and the winter solstice.

– A recipe a coworker shared with me today for easy white bean, kale and sausage soup that even I could pull off. I can’t wait to make and eat a bowl of this with a glass of red wine and a piece of crusty bread.

– Making Cocktail Hour mixed CDs for New Year’s presents.

– Coming out of therapy, feeling happy and weight-less and having to wait for a white horse drawing a carriage to pass before I crossed the street. I forget that what seems ordinary in Charleston — getting caught in traffic behind a horse-drawn carriage and bitching about it the whole time — is such a gift.

– Watching Love Actually again, a cheesy heartthrob of a movie for the holidays.

– Drawing names in my family for Secret Santa gifts and avoiding the manic consumerism that usually has me ready for a strait jacket. Best. Holiday. Ever. It means being able to take time to select a gift for one person that is intentional and not hastily improvised.

– Coming home in the dark and plugging in my year-round Frida-like porch lights. Hello little house, sweet little Happy Shack — I love you!

– A cold December rain outside while I’m warm inside under my down duvet. Realizing how undeservedly lucky I am. Why am I at home and not homeless? I need to give more and take less.

I love my bed. I love reading in my bed, staying up late in my bed, resetting the alarm to give me more time in my bed. But I watched a TEDx San Francisco video tonight by a woman named Mel Robbins, who is probably one of those people who would really annoy me and tire me out in real life, but whose talk woke up part of me that has been sleeping for the past year, especially when she explained her theory about “hitting the inner snooze button.” You know, those times when you have an intriguing and possibly original idea but you immediately dismiss it, turn it off, turn your back on it, turn the juice off. Because that idea will never fly, someone’s already thought of it and who really cares? I do it constantly. It’s so predictable it’s embarrassing. I hit my inner snooze button instead of getting up and following that idea like a dog in heat. I do the same thing in the morning … resist getting out of bed, resist being awake to the world, resist the mystery of the day ahead. Because it is a big, fucking mystery in which as the Robert Bly poem goes, “someone may bring a bear to your door.” If you find yourself also hitting the inner snooze button, have a look at the video and think about following her 5-second rule for a few days and see what happens.

Yugen (u-gen), Japanese: an awareness of the world that triggers feelings too profound and mysterious for words. When that happens to me, it’s usually the result of letting the natural world in past my big giant head, which is always over-thinking, planning, posing, supposing. One of my best memories — which I have to approach sideways in order not to wear it out or lose it — is of standing in front of a huge overgrown wall of purple morning glories on a walk and suddenly having a fleeting insight into how small I was in the vastness of being. It only lasted for seconds and yet years later I remember it as being a long stop-time in which I was completely open and permeable to existence. It was mystical and completely out of character. The only times that come close are when I sometimes make eye contact with a stranger and feel overwhelmed by tenderness for their suffering, enduring, surviving, persisting humanness. When something like that makes it through my tough, 21st century hide, I kind of swoon inside like a Victorian lady. As I took this photo out the window of my third-floor office (my personal laboratory for cloud and shadow study), I was lifted out of myself for a second into a melancholy, unnameable yearning upward. Yugen.

For the last year I’ve been pissing and moaning about moving, getting away, running away. I’ve felt as if  I was through with this city, bored, boring and chafing at the bit. Never mind that I didn’t have any other place I wanted to be, no other place to call “home.” I mentally rehearsed living in Hawaii (too expensive), London (too expensive), going back home to Kentucky (too emotionally expensive), anywhere but here. I can’t say that it’s been a bad year in the sense that so many people are having a bad year by losing jobs and homes and hope, but it’s been a bad year in the sense of being lost, wandering, wondering, wishing I could get out of my skin and be someone better, fiercer, happier, less invested in loss. I’ve been working hard at understanding why I feel this way, so flat and foreign. I went through years when I lost my inner ear for music; I just didn’t feel it or hear it or want it. I was like those people who  suddenly lose their ability to taste because of some sort of illness, and when my craving for music returned, I realized what a big hole its absence had left in my life. Now I can’t get through the day without a soundtrack. Rock anthems on the way to work, jazz to rock me to sleep. Just as recently I’ve been able to see again, really see the beauty that I swim in daily. The moon riding high and pale in a blue morning sky, the russet autumn marsh grass, the ruffled water of the harbor, a hidden pond on my drive to work where an egret lives, the in-your-face sunsets that winter bring. Leaving work as the days grow shorter, I suddenly notice the neon theater sign that has always been just across the street, clouds stained candy-cotton pink at twilight, ordinary buildings made mysterious by the coming night, the small but intense satisfaction of plugging in my strings of porch lights when I come home. I’m not ready to say I’ve made peace with where I am, that I’ll never leave, that I don’t long for some nameless More, but like my ability to hear music again, my eyes are opening to what is exquisite all around me. And that is enough for now.