Good days and less than good days all conspire to form a life. What will this year bring? This story began with winter’s chill and has passed through a pastel spring, on the way to the verdant green of early summer. I’m luxuriating at a coffee shop sucking down my high-test in an attempt to gain energy and perspective on my life. I love the atmosphere of exposed brick and wide plank wooden floors, the unmistakable perfume of brewed coffee overtaking the air. Headphones or ear buds have become necessary to drown out and deafen the incessant chatter that accompanies caffeinated conversation, making the concentration for writing almost impossible. I pulled up some soft jazz to fill the background din, something innocuous and not too emotional, just enough muzak to block out the external voices. I’ve been feeling trapped in our house of late, with no writing desk or space to call my own, just a small breakfast table by the window in the kitchen. This is pretty nice actually, soft mellow jazz instrumentals playing through my ear canals just enough to make the human voices all but fade away. Musical bliss or at least diversion has made the writing process possible. Creative writing for me necessitates quiet, deafening quiet, at least until today. Trendy coffee shops are my woman cave, but normally for other aspects of the literary process such as editing, or what I call drafting. I write longhand, the old fashioned way, in a black leather journal with just the right pen, my special writing implement, sleek, weighty, stylish, and ergonomic, like liquid gold.

The new year began for many littered with prognostications and well meaning intentions, never to come to fruition even as the sentiments dripped from their lips on New Year’s Eve. My year began with the pursuit of shalom, wholeness. The Hebrew word has many meanings indeed, but too often people experience only the shallow waters of this concept, rather than the depth of meaning. Although shalom is best known as “peace”, there are so many layers to shalom. The idea of “wholeness” beckons my spirit. Webster’s defines shalom as ‘recovering from a wound or injury”, “constituting the entirety of a person’s nature or development”, “complete or full, lacking nothing”, “not divided or cut into pieces”. Resolutions proclaimed on any holiday, particularly one fraught with such hope, are arduous at best. Why set yourself up like that? It’s a champagne and glitter line in the sand of your well-meaning life. The line of demarcation for turning your existence into a long hoped for reality perhaps? I prefer no beginning and no end, just the journey of days melding together in a procession of dreams and goals, work and accomplishment, strivings and failings, good days and other ones, all forming our lives. It would be my guess that the dawn of a new day, or season, or year, brings with it new hope for something better, something yet attainable. I too fall prey to the newness and hope of the Christmas season and the resolute determination for a new beginning. I’ll admit this is the year! There I said it. A little seedling of hope is growing. The growing process is amazing when you think of the life cycle of a seed first dying and being buried, before it can spring to new life. The last two years have seen enough darkness and burial, and the aching sound of my spirit dying. “The tragedy of life is not death but what we let die inside of us while we live” – Norman Cousins. I’ve come through my cycle of burial and death, and now I am finally springing forth to new life. The year of many good things, of living into my belovedness as a child of God, and all that He created me to be.

This is my year of shalom! Seasons and days pass with the pursuit of dreams and of life. Last year I read an article that spoke about the direct correlation of where you live, and the opportunities you have. I printed the article and kept it on my kitchen counter for two weeks, never dreaming that within twelve months we would leave the tropical beauty of our Floridian paradise for the inestimable opportunity that arises when you find your tribe

and are finally home. As winter lay heavy upon us, we packed up and fulfilled the newest dream of relocating to Tennessee to be part of our beloved GRACEPOINTE community. I used to believe that life was very transactional with God. The other end of the spectrum, and one that I equally don’t give complete credence to, is that you can totally manifest your life. I believe life is a mystical combination of God’s incarnation in all of us, and the determination of our true selves, co-creating our best life. Intuitively I knew that Southwest Florida, while inspiring in its inherent beauty, could not offer the artistic and literary opportunities that a larger community could, and certainly not the spiritual opportunities that I am so desperately seeking. Perhaps the seed of artistic pursuit lay the groundwork for a change of heart and mind that would eventually lead to the major move to the Nashville area. Everything conspired at once to bring me to a place of breaking, longing, and my pursuit of shalom. My life has been lived with emotional baggage clinging to me like a wad of gum stuck to the sole of my shoe on a hot summer day. Sticky and unable to extricate myself from the burdens, my year of shalom is teaching me a new reality, a new way of being in this life. My year of shalom and my journey to the GRACEPOINTE community is part of the entirety of my development, and a sense of wholeness. Good days and sometimes less than good days conspire to form a life. This is my year of shalom!