This afternoon I was torn– should I take a nap, or maybe work in the studio, or grab a last perfect warm day to go out in my kayak. I’m so grateful my sense of adventure called out to me and I loaded up the kayak. It’s Indian Summer here. Seventy degree days, and forty-ish nights. A few lovely colored leaves, but mostly green. Winter is slipping up on us, behind our backs.

I wore layers, and took only a camera, a sketchbook and an apple. Once there– at Mountain Island Lake, the boat slipped easily into the water, and I set off at a leisurely pace, shucking some layers to bask. The light lured me–its extremes of bright and dark. The shadows were bluer and the sunlight yellower than normal. I took a few easy strokes and let the currents drive me into my favorite cove.

Nobody except two other kayakers seemed to be on the whole immense lake, and we were all bent on the same thing– the zen paddle. One paddler had her dog trained to stand on the back deck of her kayak, and they toured the opposite bank. Another appeared to be napping in the middle of the lake. Like them, I didn’t go for an upper body workout, or for some competitive need to reach Australia. I went to drift. I like to feel the water move through the thin skin of the kayak. I go for the silence–and I practice making my strokes soundless and invisible. I like to think of myself as some latter day native American, sneaking up on the woods. This behavior has its rewards. As soon as I hit the edge of that cove the world opened up and the act of being alive on that day in that place became the whole point.

First I scared up a small duck who flew deeper into the cove to evade me. Then I found myself, the water clear as clean glass, looking down on some huge fishes. The were the size of a man’s forearm, and just as muscular, arching in S formations, and when they’d gotten enough of me, they muddied the shallow water to throw me off. A kayak will continue moving forward in only a few inches of water, so I can go all the way to the back of that cove, and always do. Sometimes, back there,I can look down and see the tracks left by a wading heron printed into the undisturbed mud.

A little turtle the size of a silver dollar jumped off the limb he was sitting on and hid in the water as soon as he realized I was there. The water’s surface was patterned with the first fallen autumn leaves. Some were long and narrow shapes that curled up at one end. And when the wind blew they moved across the surface of the water like little gondolas headed for shore.

I took perhaps 75 photographs, and never drew. I didn’t want to stop long enough to concentrate on a drawing. But I did stop, in the middle of the quiet cove, to put my feet up on the deck and just BE. Floating into the sunlight of a clearing the air would wrap around my bare arms like a warm sweater, then a few seconds later it would gently cool. The little duck, wary of my presence at the back of the cove, flew in the other direction.

Over and over I thought to myself about what a blessing this afternoon was. I thought of my friend Beth, who once went kayaking with me, much to her delight, and has now left this earth. I thanked God for allowing me this day. I reminded myself to do this again and again. I told myself it probably didn’t take 100 calories to make this afternoon happen and that tiny expenditure took me to the head table at the Feast. When the sun dropped almost behind the high banks I paddled back to shore, and headed for home. And when I got there I left the kayak in the back of the truck to tip the scale in favor of waking up in the morning and going right back.

Remembering this past summer calls up dozens of images of shimmering overheated days spent working on the details of the barn project. There were light fixtures and hardware to install. There were shelves and a deck to be built, and a floor to be put down.

I found myself growing accustomed to the intense heat, from being outside in it every day, and hardly ran the air conditioner at all, once back inside. When it was time to lay the floor, Jose and I pulled out all the dusty original boards that had been the barn floor since 1890, milled originally in my great grandfather’s saw mill. My friend and neighbor, Rodney Readling, a real Renaissance man who can make almost anything, agreed to plane the old barn boards for me and to serve as my floor supervisor.

Rodney sent me to an exterminator supply company for the appropriate chemicals for treating historic lumber, and I mixed it up and sprayed both sides of the newly planed boards. Once run through the planer their million worm holes showed up. The heartwood, full of 122 year old resin, was, of course, bug free, but the soft wood was riddled with tiny tunnels. It doesn’t matter how old heart pine is, when you sand it or plane it or cut it, it smells like wind blowing through a pine forest.

Rodney gave me a wonderful concise tutorial on how to lay this unconventional (today) material as a finished floor. He also showed me how to use a speed square in conjunction with my saw to get straight cuts. As a young girl I attempted to sign up for Industrial Arts at my school, was hauled into the principal’s office and told girls weren’t allowed in Industrial Arts. So every scrap of learning I’m able to get about the workings of wood and tools and metals is precious to me.

Jose, my helper, and I started off a little on the rough side, trying to understand the natural curvature of the wood, and its reluctance to butt tightly up against its neighbor. Our first couple of rows went slowly. But we persisted. Things got better when I realized that Jose knew more about carpentry than I’d suspected and that I should follow his lead. He learned that I could be trusted to measure and cut the wood accurately and we developed a floor team that was pretty professional by the time we got half way through the space.

Stewart came out to help me with the floor finishing, which involved hand sanding the wood. The job was complicated by our allergies, and by the boric acid which the wood had been treated with. The resins in the dense old wood also clogged and coated the sandpaper within seconds of contact. It was brutal. But Stewart stepped up to the plate and we took turns being beaten up by the very heavy , violent floor sander we were using. Rodney sent me to a wooden floor company to research finishes, and the varnish went down, revealing the beauty of the tiger striped heartwood.

Paul Hollar, recovering from his chemotherapy and radiation, agreed to be my shadetree foreman, and instruct me in how to get my deck built. He arrived with his folding chair, parked it under a big pecan tree, and proceeded to never sit in it. He showed us– the laborers, what had to be done, and usually moved in to do a lot of it himself. Like any job, I learned this summer, a rhythm develops as the job proceeds, among the people working on it. Paul, so sure of what he was doing, pretty much dismissed my help, and proceeded with Jose, to build the deck. I worried about his working in the heat, but it seemed that every day, as he worked, he forgot about being ill, and his spirit lightened a little. He would pick up his hammer and swing it with the grace of a true carpenter, from the whole body, not just the arm, in a way that seemed effortless.

Frank Cheney, the architect who made the space coherent and poetic, came back and drew the plan for finishing the entrances, and is advising me on a canopy for the front door. It’s almost time to warm this barn with a gathering of friends. I treasure the hard work, the talents, the altruism and kindness, the level of engagement each person has brought to the Cotton Barn project. It has been a labor of love, and for me of learning. My brother and I like to imagine our father and mother, our grandparents and great grandparents looking on the little barn with pleasure from some place, we hope, not too far away.

With Paul Hollar recuperating , Andy Knox  agreed to take over the completion of the barn interior.  His crew moved quickly to bring things together.  Over time the vision for what the space should do became clearer– it would be a sculpture studio, and a summer painting studio for large scale work, and on its walls I would hang paintings.  It would also store all the tools I’ve collected over time.

Just before work on the interior  began I was introduced to an eminent architect– Frank Cheney. Frank has had an illustrious career, working for I.M.Pei and Charles W. Moore, as well as Cambridge Seven and Associates.  In grad school at Yale he was Teaching Assistant to Vincent Scully. Now he heads his own firm in Greensboro.

Frank asked to see the barn I’d told him so much about, so I invited him down for dinner and a look.  It was his first visit to the farm, so we walked around the place, the garden and the studio, and then stepped into the barn.  I told him about my plans for the space’s layout and he suggested that there might be a better way to structure the interior spaces.  While I put the finishing touches on dinner, Frank sat down at my desk. Without  a second look at the structure he drew a plan, freehand, in  perfect proportion, incorporating his new ideas.

My first stubborn reaction was to cling to my old notions, but sanity ruled and very quickly I  released them and yielded to the genius of Frank’s plan.    In a couple of days I was ordering more windows and  revisiting everything with the builder.  The humble cotton barn, wracked with age, rescued by a 17 year old, bearing second hand windows, was about to enter a new phase.  It was moving toward clarity and functionality.  But best of all, it was moving toward the divine.

Through my friendship with the sculptor Tom Sachs I’d become intrigued with the idea of the studio as a sacred space.  Tom put out an amazing film called Working to Code. It’s an instructional video for his studio assistants which is both tongue-in-cheek and very serious.  In it he refers to the studio as sacred space.  The film’s illustration  of sacred space is three women waiting on the curb for a Muslim counterfeit handbag salesman , who is  kneeling on the sidewalk on a scrap of cardboard, occupied with his prayers.   At our first meeting a couple of years ago the first thing Tom and I discussed was the way work was a conduit to the divine.  He quoted, at the time, the Benedictine maxim “to work is to pray”.

Frank and I never discussed this, but from his intuitive and experiential wisdom he invoked the sacred space archetypes in this humble barn.  He urged me to admit the light from the north and east by adding more windows high up on the walls.   He redesigned the storage so it emphasized the verticality of the space and created a focal point for the room. The 130 year old church shutters moved to this focal point, where I’ve been wrestling to make their 378 moving parts (I counted) line up and act right.

On a brief visit a couple of weeks ago to the Turchin Center at Appalachian I saw an exhibition based on research about sacred spaces. The wall text asserted that there were three characteristics shared by nearly all sacred spaces. A sacred space is:
-a place where an individual finds solace.
-a space free from distraction which allows inward reflection.
-a place of rejuvenation and inspiration.
I know that now, since Frank’s plans have been made real. When I am in the barn I do not want to go back to the house. And when I am in the house I want to get back out to the barn. It has become the most compelling space in several thousand square feet of spaces. It is where I can go to greet my truest and best self.

Thank you, Mr. Cheney.

I love a good story about an old building, so I will have to hold myself back from making my Story of a Barn series into a nouvella.  Oh… maybe I should just give in to that impulse…

Once the big panel truck took Gordon and all his many possessions  to Brooklyn to live I still held out hope, for a while, that he might decide to come back home and finish the barn.  But, after a couple of years passed and he signed a five year lease, I realized the barn was going to remain a lumpish half done reminder if I didn’t take it on myself.  We negotiated the transfer of his project to me, and I hired some help.

Paul Nelson Hollar is a third generation carpenter.  His grandfather built the house I grew up in.  His father helped my father with the construction of our mountain house.  And Paul had helped me and my brother since we were all very young, with various jobs we undertook.  Paul had just finished rehabbing an old tenant farm house for my brother when I asked him if he’d help me put a floor in my barn.  He agreed and he and his wife Joan  showed up on consecutive Saturdays to work on the framework and  put down plywood.  We’d have lunch and laugh  a lot.  Joan could easily be a comedienne.  It was like potato chips– I couldn’t stop there.  After the plywood we decided to work on the siding, and on installing windows.

Paul knew the owner of the local sawmill and arranged for the wood to be cut, and hauled in.  He patiently worked with me, picking up second hand windows and doors, trying to keep the project on a budget I could afford.    Out of the attic came the wonderful turn of the century beveled, leaded glass window Paul’s father had given me 30 years before– just because I admired it.  I had driven by the Hollar’s house at sunset, and the west-facing window tacked into the shop out back caught the sunlight and refracted it like a thousand diamonds.  It was breathtaking.  Nelson removed it and gave it to me– because that’s the kind of people they are.  Paul and I picked a west-facing wall and figured out where to install it.

Paul is a cowboy and most of the people who work with him  are cowboys.  Lamont, who helped with the barn, also helped my brother train his beautiful American Paint/ Percheron to wear a bridle and pull a plow.  Paul and Joan have a business boarding and caring for horses on the grounds of their early 18th century home.   They come out of that culture– love of the land, love of the old ways, abject honesty, total integrity, and a strong belief in helping one’s neighbors.  Paul grew up on a gentle rise  in my rural community, on property that had been farmed by his family for generations.  Like many people in our community, all around him were cousins, aunts, and uncles.  And it’s still that way.  We used to love to get his Aunt Belle to tell us stories of the old days.  She told us how our grandfathers would all thresh together.  They would go from farm to farm, as a group, threshing.  And the womenfolk at whatever farm they were threshing would feed them all that day.  It was a competition to see who set the best table.  Our community is still known for its fine cooking .  It was rural, but it was interdependent– black or white, modest or well-off, everyone depending on the help of the others.  Even into our parents’ generation they still particpated in barn raisings, and assisted neighbors in need without a second thought.  So Paul, almost as an act of neighborly love, took on my project, and gave a lot of care to helping raise my barn.   Every Saturday, after he left I would take a photograph of what it looked like and email it to Brooklyn with the subject line “Today”.

All along Paul and Joan asked me “what are you going to do with this barn”.  At first I didn’t know.  I just knew I wanted to resolve the unfinished quality of it, and I knew that if I coexisted with it, time would tell me what to do.  With 10 foot louvered shutters discarded from the 1881 church in our community, I first planned a storage closet, with shutters for doors.  I would store tools in the space, and maybe have a covered workshop.  In that big expanse of wall I thought I might hang some of my extra paintings, so collectors could see them assembled.  But it was a vague plan, without much form.

Things ground to a halt when Paul told me he’d been diagnosed with throat cancer.   A cowboy doesn’t take much notice of things like that.  He just keeps right on going.  He was told it was totally curable, but there has been chemotherapy and radiation and a cure that’s worse than the disease.   And just for now, this big old cowboy’s hammer has been silenced.

It’s mid-week in mid-May and I have the good fortune to find myself on a little adventure.  After school I drove up to the mountains to the lovely, rambling house of friends.  They loaned me their mountain house so I could transact some business in the vicinity.  Lucky for me, it’s very cold so I’m sitting by a blazing, snapping fire with a glass of wine, and taking time to write in unfamiliar and friendly surroundings, far away from the rest of the world.

This house is built to accommodate four children, their spouses and fifteen grandchildren so it’s jolly even when it’s empty– echoes of optimism all around me.  The house sits on a hundred acres designated as Stewardship Forest and on the walls are hundreds of photographs of easy, happy family times, collections of arrowheads, wild turkey feathers and stone age tools.  It is a place that’s all about love of family and love of the land.

I’m tucked in amongst the books and the stonework, socked in by fog and toasted, on the front side at least, by my cozy fire.  What a luxury to be alone with one’s thoughts; to be removed from routine and exploring new places; to be alone on a mountaintop.  This big echoing house must be startled by its lone guest, accustomed as it is to a huge family that enjoys its time together.  Big and empty as it is, it’s doing its best to embrace me.

In the morning the house is still cold.  I have clearly not decoded the furnace.  So first thing I start a fire in the wood stove from last night’s coals.  In my robe, with a cup of coffee, I prop my feet in front of the fire.  Outside, the house is blanketed in a smoky white fog and the fire and fog trigger a favorite memory.

I am 20.  I have been camping at Linville Gorge near the falls with  my boyfriend.  We have spent a cold night sleeping on a 30 degree incline, deep in our down bags.  This is the boyfriend I let slip away, though he earnestly held a ruby engagement ring out to me in the front seat of a Toyota in city traffic.  Upon waking in Linville Gorge with the sound of the falls all around us on that long ago morning, we broke camp and drove away in search of some creature comforts.  We found a rustic restaurant with a hearth and a blazing fire, and early on that foggy mountain morning we gratefully ordered huge breakfasts and produced our own bottle of campsite-chilled champagne to go with it.

In memory there is laughter, firelight, bubbles and complete relaxed pleasure in the company of another.  How, I have asked myself many times, did I allow myself to discard that for the company of less joyful, more tortured souls?  Thousands of firelit mornings lie between this one and that.  But none so crystal clear, with a sense of wholeness and happiness.  I was accepted as I was.  I was encouraged to be more wholly myself that I ever had been.  I was truly loved by another joyous and playful soul.  In my innocence and ignorance I did not know the purity with which a boy first loves.  Instead, I presumed a good deal less.

But I have, as a kind of marker, that memory.  When I feel that whole and happy again I will recognize it and cherish it.  And should that not happen I will simply hold as dear as a blood red ruby in a small box the memory of that morning.  I believe the value of memories is as great as the pleasures of the moment, or the anticipation of the future.

The fog is lifting and I have my first sighting of what might lay beyond this porch.  It promises to be a ravishing day.

On Saturday I met my dear friend, Cait, for a couple of hours, to catch up and share an art experience on my short trek to New York.  Fortunately, I asked her to choose the venue, so in the cold wind I walked unknowingly toward amazement.   Chilled by our early morning walk, we found a cozy Cuban restaurant to stop in for cocoa and coffee.  Tucked in among the several murals of tropical Cuba, and with a view from the bar of the yucca, plantains and yellow rice being prepared,  the  conversation flowed.  Once in a while, when hanging out with someone, I will realize how happy I am, and how much fun I’m having.  Hanging out with Cait is like that.  I could have sat in that steamy place enjoying her for hours.  But we pressed on to Gagosian.

I had just seen a large Kiefer canvas the day before at the Met, and many times before in various art publications, but until I saw the Gagosian exhibition I didn’t understand the full  range of his work.  The scale was overwhelming.  The canvases were about 12 feet tall, and 20 feet, or so, wide.  They were stark landscapes, but served , also, as environments.  They were colder than the November wind outside, covered as they were in snow .  The work evoked the Halocaust in a hundred compelling ways, not the least of which was its sensitive command of  mood.

The palette of the entire room was restrained– white, dulled metals, browns.  One painting was so fiercely textured that it represented the Alps with uncanny accuracy. It was, in fact, more a sculpture made of paint and canvas than a painting.   Huge vitrines filled the gallery center, made of patinated steel and glass,  as tall as the paintings.  They enclosed assemblages and constructions on several threads of the theme.   In a few, clothing functioned as metaphor for humankind.  One held a stiffened evening gown, white, with a hundred large shards of glass piercing the skirt.  We laughed ruefully to think that most women wear that ballgown  at least once  in their lives.

Some of the vitrines evoked warfare, like one with forms reminiscent of submarines, suspended by long wires at various depths.  Many referenced nature in a charred, dried or deadened state.  The installation  cast a spell by virtue of its arrangement and the density and variety of the images.  I was in a space, far back in time, when it was cold and devastation was all around me.  Only the vestiges of humanity remained.  It was silent, frozen, brittle, and echoing.  It was attenuated and delicate, towering and haunted, like a dreamscape that had been once long ago been reality.

Early June is about as paradisical as North Carolina gets.  There are thousands of flowers around me– probably a hundred roses that I can see from my kitchen window.  The first tomatoes have just appeared in the garden.   There are glossy eggplants and cool cucumbers.  It’s steamy and overwhelming at midday, but gentle and ravishing at 7a.m.  I often end up planning a trip to somewhere else in June, and missing a portion of this time.  What bad planning I always end up telling myself.

The Ruin has reached a lovely state of maturity.  The rock walls I built last summer now mark the borders of a couple of painterly and colorful beds– one filled with organic and heirloom vegetables, and one with flowering plants.  I’m puttering with some antique sections of iron fencing, trying to give the Ruin  a sense of enclosure.  More and more my entertainments end up in the Ruin.  It has an irresistable pull.  A couple of weeks ago friends from Greensboro came for supper and we started there, evolving into the dining room, and finishing out the evening on the front porch.  I read an article about the guy who came up with the idea for The Moth, on public radio.  He had great memories of story telling on a screened porch in the south on summer evenings, and transplanted it to NYC and public radio.

I share those great memories, adults rocking in a half dozen big old oak rockers, while the children played leapfrog on the lawn and caught lightnin’ bugs (not “fireflies”– lightnin’ bugs ).  I decided to rededicate my front porch to story telling.  So I told my dinner guests to bring a story.  I’m finding we’re a bit rusty in the story telling department, but I intend to work on that.  You think up a great story and so will I.  And next time we’re sitting somewhere in the semi-darkness of a summer evening, let’s bring it out and try it on our friends.  Let’s keep all the good stories, and more importantly, the tradition of telling the stories, alive, whether we’re sitting in a roof garden in the city,  beside a campfire in the forest, or in a rocker on an old front porch.

Last night John Borden Evans opened at the Christa Faut Gallery. It was great to see his newest work in the company of his many friends and fans here in the area. His work always has a strong resonance for me, because we have both chosen rural lifestyles and our environments have much in common.

John often creates diptychs. I recall one from a show several years ago that was immense, and divided in two parts so it could be transported. In this exhibition he had one diptych that was a small work on paper, and another that was midsized. It amused me that it hung next to a painting that was on a single canvas, but split in half by the black line of a tree trunk, so it read like a diptych as well.

This work had John’s usual wonderful quirkiness and intense sense of texture. There were paintings with his own iconography I’ve come to expect– the stars and their auras, abstracted in this show to look like jewels. There were animals arranged in pastures. But there was also a new thing going on– a quieter, more serene and restrained approach to the land in several of the paintings. They were empty of animal life, and focused on balance: of verticals and horizontals, of  smooth with rough, of darkness and light. A favorite was a snow day painting, as usual, abstracted with abandon, but all the same, reading with the truth I recognize as a student of the landscape. It conveyed the way the snow peaks out and exposes the contours of the forest floor normally hidden in the grayness of a thousand bare tree limbs. The texture he created to describe the trees in the foreground was perversely horizontal, when the obvious direction for them to have been painted would be vertical or diagonal. It married serenity and intensity,  smooth and rough, white snow sky and darkened forest,truth and the myth.  All were suspended in  quiet equilibrium.

One of many full moon paintings inspired by this place. This one: "Full Moon with Cedars" 2005

It’s a new day in a new year, beginning a new decade.  I’m grateful for that.  We talked today, at Kim and Grier’s table, over blackeyed peas and collard greens, about how we all, in our own ways, managed to miss the clock turning over.  But I think we all felt keenly this invitation to newness and change.

I marked the close of last year by writing out my intentions for the coming year.  This is much more productive than making resolutions.  I’m bad at resolution-keeping.  But if I name an intention it rides around in  my unconscious all the time, and often  has a way of making itself reality.  Looking at last year’s intentions, they seemed a bit vague, though I did notice that most of them had happened.    This year’s are very concrete.  I celebrated them with a brandy and dark chocolates that Carla had brought me.    Then I called Rodney– my friend since college days, and we tripped over one another’s sentences, talking for an hour about past, present and future.

This morning, to celebrate the newness, I could only think of taking a walk back into the woods.  Lacking tractors and chainsaws I often resort to third world techniques for getting a job done.  With my machete, bought in Central America for $1.50, and sharpened by my sons, I cut the briars out of my path, finding my way to the back of my little farm.  It was warm and the woods were a hundred soft grays.  All the recent rain had made the  mosses brilliant and lush.  I found a little spring-fed creek I’d never seen before.   After lunch I could only think to go back to the woods.  This time I brought back a sapling that had fallen and developed beautiful lichens.  Tonight, on this first night of the new year I noticed it took darkness a little longer to arrive, and when it did the white disk of the moon rose slowly up behind the bare branched trees as it has hundreds of times in my life here.  It was so beautiful it brought  tears along with thoughts of dear friends scattered and far away, and my never-ending deep gratitude for this earthly home.

tree trunk in the maritime forest

It’s Monday back in the real world.  I’m attempting to pretend I’m all here, but I still have one foot on an island.  Yesterday’s sunrise, which seems a continent away and a month behind me, was a battle between blackened hovering clouds and peach colored light thrown at the edges of billowing cloud formations.  It came and went, shifting back and forth.  I sat in the sand and tried to paint a seized moment here and an arrested cloud there.  Sand blew low and hard, needle-pricking me.  It completely filled my paintbox and scattered itself on my page.  My brush, new and sharp-pointed- became frayed and full of sand particles.  My hair blew so hard across my face I couldn’t see.  The waves tossed spray high above the horizon line.  A heron flew overhead.  Then a peregrin falcon.  It was altogether a spectacular and peculiar sunrise.

The night before, at dusk, we had traveled to a roosting site, hidden away from the public, to watch perhaps one hundred or more egrets and ibises rocking up and down on tree limbs suspended over a perfect mirror of a pond.  The mosquitoes lit on our faces and arms and drew blood in spite of toxic doses of bug spray we’d bathed in.

Part of that day had been spent in the maritime forest, learning about plant species.  The woods were scattered with deadwood more extreme than any sculpture.  We were irresistably drawn to touch it and photograph it from every angle.  Yesterday morning we took a walk in the marsh and sat long enough on an ancient dune, now covered with cabbage palms and live oaks  ( called a hammock), to observe the behavior of fiddler crabs.  I had time enough to do a lightning fast sketch of the underbrush on the hammock.  I learned new words for the plants  and creatures that fill the marshes– spartina, sea lavendar, periwinkle snails.  Mike picked up a glass lizard, the only legless lizard I have ever seen.  Empowered by my previous night’s experience of petting the belly of a California King Snake I attempted to do the same to the glass lizard, who struck at me.  No harm done beyond the embarrassment  of my own reaction–  abject bone-rattling fear, which greatly amused my fellow adventurers.

There was butterfly catching, seining, lots of drawing to record what I saw.  I was swimming in a soup of sensation.  It made me delirious and carried me out of myself and back into union with the earth.  It is with reluctance that I bring myself back to electric lights and cars, billboards and cellphones.  I looked back at my journal from last September’s trip to this island.  In it I said that I’d had the revelation while there that the secret to living this second part of my life was to live it like a poem.  “order it and edit it and take time to live it consciously”.  This year I plan to remind myself everyday that I am in the midst of a poem.