El fin de ano

As the end of 2010 approaches, I contemplate my year of recreating my life.  Last year I spent five months in San Miguel, and seven months in Iowa City.  My desires to redefine myself as a writer took some unexpected routes.  Yet this is what risk-taking entails:  you never know if that decision to leap will pay off in the way you perceived it might.  For instance, I didn't stay in San Miguel,  Did I imagine I would return to Iowa City so early?  I knew it was a possibility, but there were so many unimaginable occurrences in San Miguel that I had to re-evaluate my vision.  Am I sorry I returned home to the heartland?  No.

I could never articulate the whole of my fragility when I did come back, for I truly was alone and starting over.  Yet the investment of my time in Mexico is where the risk-taking proved its worth.  As in every time spent away from your home, I gained a plethora of information as well as an increase in writing as a discipline.  My dream of beginning a blog was realized in Iowa, but seeded in San Miguel.
The translations I did of my poet friend from Guanajuato, Juan Manuel, are to be published in a literary journal out of Austin.   In truth, I have gained a momentum, and increased my literary contacts.  After all, I now live in the City of Literature.  And, as a friend counseled when I was debating my return, I don't have to share my quarters with fleas!!

It is a great thing to live in uncertainty--and greater when you have chosen a path that facilitates this lifestyle.  But what if the soul really does expand when you choose to honor and respect its primary importance in  your life?  What truly happens to those who, like the Fool in the tarot deck, step over the cliff, and look up, not down?  Sometimes I observe closely my fellow human beings who have not chosen my lifestyle for the answers to that question.  I often see a kind of happiness which holds its roots in the certainty that they will never even approach that cliff.  Control and management constitute the thread of their existence.  Their happiness, however, does not encompass an expansive comprehension of "the other",  those whose circumstances do not equal their own.  We are in an age where the gap between such distinct lives, the secure and the insecure, is stretching to a point of consequence.

2010 was a significant year of changes for millions of people in the world.  The hope for 2011 is that we can live with those changes in hope and dignity.  That I can live with the changes in my life, with hope and dignity.

Art collage copyright 2010 Corinne J.Stanley