A Strange Land

I was engrossed in reading Stieg Larsson’s book “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest”, the third novel in the Lisbeth Salander series.  Occasionally I would check my watch to see if it was really time to go to sleep…12:30AM…..2:00AM….3:00AM.  Eventually I looked up and noticed the horizon was getting light…dawn…definitely too late for a reasonable amount of sleep.  Guiltily, I shut down my kindle and resolved to sneak in at least a few hours of sleep.  Alas, it was dawn.  There was no way I was going to fall asleep, so I wandered over to my windows overlooking the valley and found fog lapping at the hillside.

Adrift in a sea of fog.

It seemed appropriate to pay attention. A full moon lights this New Year’s Eve, by necessity, a blue moon. At fifty-two, I have the time and relative lack of commitments to pause a moment, or two, or more than several and pay attention. They happen, or so I am told, about every nineteen years or so, or perhaps it is exactly and I wasn’t paying sufficient attention. Nineteen years would mean that I had missed two previous New Year’s Eve Blue Moon events. One at about thirty-three when I was distracted by the demands of a young family and the other at fourteen, when I was just distracted or conversely far too self absorbed to notice much outside my own evolving turbulent self. One cannot say really if another nineteen years down the road I will be here, or sufficiently aware to notice. So, I wandered outside, into the cold, well, this is Southern California and cold is a relative issue, and stared for awhile. A lovely moon set in a clear cold cloudless sky. Assuredly bonus points are allocated in some karmic register for noticing the turning of these cosmic cycles and I wandered back inside.

So, it has been an odd year. A year sufficiently odd than I hesitate in contemplation of what to wish for. Wishes get twisted. So, here’s to the New Year, whatever it might come to be, and the opportunity to see it through.