Happy New Year

It's the first morning of 2026.  For many of us, the start of a new year is the opportunity to shake off the dust from the previous year, and to look forward with hope to the promise of a clean slate.  It's like opening a new notebook, with all those blank pages and the possibilities they represent.  We resolve to get fit, to learn something new, to be different and better.  We choose a word of the year, with the idea that everything we experience in that year will in some way reflect that word in a positive way.  

Frankly, most of the time, none of that pans out.  I don't remember what my word of the year was for 2025, although I'm sure if I go back to my first blog of the year it'll be there.  I probably had several goals for 2025, but the only one I achieved was to read at least 52 books in the year (I did 63, plus the short Bible books I didn't count in the number).  I didn't finish any cross stitch projects except the yearly Christmas ornaments.  I didn't sing or play the piano every day.  I didn't declutter my house, although I am getting better at mindful spending, to stop bringing so much into the house in the first place.  I most certainly did not lose the weight I intended to lose, but my average weight these days is five to seven pounds less than I hovered around a few years ago, so that's something.

This year, my word is "Beauty," and I really thought about this one.  I want to surround myself with beauty this year, to recognize it when it presents itself, and to let go of anything that doesn't embody beauty.  One could argue that that's what this blog is all about--I write about the beauty I find, often in unexpected places.  I am inspired by beauty and try to illuminate it when I see, hear, or feel it.  I think we often have a limited view of what beauty is.  We call a person or a flower beautiful when they are pleasing to the eye.  A voice is beautiful when it has a certain sound that matches what it is singing or saying.  Art, whether visual or aural, is beautiful if it meets an accepted standard of light, color, sound, or proportions.  

But, as they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I think there's a lot more to beauty than what we see or hear.  I'm reminded of a conversation between Anne Shirley and Matthew Cuthbert in an early scene of Anne of Green Gables.  Anne asks Matthew, "Do things like this ever give you a thrill?"  And Matthew responds with, "I suppose it kind of gives me a thrill to see those ugly white grubs that spade up in the cucumber beds."  I'm sure that's not exactly what Anne had in mind, but Matthew has found joy in an unconventional place, and we can find beauty in such places if we are willing to look for it.

I used to collect elephants.  I love the peaceful, wise creatures for their strength, their loyalty, and their memory.  Some cultures believe elephants to be a symbol of wealth and prosperity, and that an elephant with its trunk up is a happy elephant, ready to bestow that wealth and prosperity on the home in which it resides, providing it is facing away from the door (facing the door means the elephant will want to leave and take the wealth and prosperity with it).  So I have many of the beautiful creatures in my home, some realistic, some cartoonish, but all facing away from the door.  Several years ago my mom gave me The Eye of the Elephant, a book by Delia and Mark Owens (yes, the Delia Owens who later wrote Where the Crawdads Sing).  It's about the Owens' efforts to stop the poaching of elephants and other animals in Zambia, and their connection to the country, the culture, and the creatures.  I've been reading it little by little over the years, and finally finished it a couple weeks ago.  It's a lovely but often frustrating account of their successes and obstacles, and ends with some hope that their efforts were not in vain.  I dogeared only one page, for the quote at the beginning of a chapter:  

The struggle for any dream

is always worth the effort,

for in the struggle lies its strength,

     and fulfillment

     toward the changing seasons

     of ourselves.

                    --Walter Rinder

This is, for me, about finding beauty where we look for it.  Fulfillment of any ideal comes after struggle and effort, and the achievement is all the sweeter for the obstacles we encounter on the way.  Think how great a cold glass of water tastes after an exhausting period of physical exertion.  In any other circumstance, it's just a glass of water, but the effort makes that mere glass of water a reward.  A celebration.  A gift from God.  It's just water, but it's the best-tasting water ever.  It's beautiful.  

This year, 2026, I am hoping to create beauty, through art and writing and music and crafting and gardening and empty space.  I am also looking around me for beauty, not just in the aural and visual, but in the intellectual, in the spiritual, in the emotional, and in my body and my environment.  A friend of mine started looking for hearts several years ago, and posts pictures of hearts she sees in unusual places.  It turns out that when you're looking for hearts, you'll see them everywhere--in leaves, footprints, bowls of soup and cups of cocoa, piles of laundry and clouds in the sky.  If you look for beauty, beauty is there, waiting to be found.  

I'm not going to tell anyone else how to live their 2026.  Choose your own resolutions or don't.  Choose your own word of the year or don't.  Whether you think you've already arrived or are an irretrievable mess, get yourself together or don't change a single thing.  But do seek beauty.  Look for the good.  Bring beauty and light and life to the world around you.  I've written this before, but if even half the world would do just one beautiful thing a day, that would put four BILLION beautiful things out there every day.  And those things are already out there.  I may regret making this my goal, because there are so many beautiful things in existence that I may run out of time to do anything else but seek beauty.  But let's just start small.  

If you've stuck with me through this whole thing, thank you for letting me share.  I hope you find beauty this year.  I hope you create beauty this year.  I wish you all the good things the world has to offer.  Be blessed, my friends.