Lil' Corner of Joy

The last few weeks of 2011 rolled by me like a whirlwind, and now, almost unexpectedly, it is 2012. Many bloggers have been talking about their new year’s resolutions, how to keep them, choose them and not become bogged down by them. This blog post by Rachelle Gardner suggests that it is the process of choosing goals, of planning what the year could become, that really matters. The process sets the intention to better ourselves or improve in some way.

I wrote no resolution as yet. I told a friend that since childhood I remained stuck in the notion of the year stretching from the first day of school to the last day of summer vacation. I remember myself as a child flipping through my new textbooks, marveling at all the new material I will have learned by the end of the year. That was my moment for making resolutions and plans, and though these days I no longer go to school, the promise of self-growth, of learning something new every day, remains a powerful influence on what I want from life.

Perhaps some new year’s resolution could benefit me. Or maybe at least some goals, hopes and dreams, wishes. Some words to frame what I want to achieve. I like the idea of setting an intention for the next twelve months.

Writing daily, being more patient with the children, managing my chores, feeling less stressed — are these worthwhile goals? Meditating more, chewing more, appreciating more, exercising more. Funny how my goals can be lofty and banal at the same time. How about enjoying life more?

I love the Buddha’s first Noble Truth: “Suffering Is.” My joy is ever colored by the nagging fear that if I embrace my gratitude, my appreciation, the object of my enjoyment will instantly disappear or change. Perhaps my goal for this year could be to make some headway in accepting change, in believing that “finding joy in life” can coexist (or perhaps can really only exist) hand in hand with “Suffering Is.”

As Abraham says, the buffet of life is filled with choices, and that is how I want it to stay. In a chaotic, crazy, out-of-control, stressed-out way, I’m actually pleased with how my life is progressing. I don’t ask for peace, because I enjoy the energy and overwhelment of  growth. I love running around. I love feeling useful and active. I love being bigger than my own life, even if I do only imagine it.

So this is my resolution for the year. As I wrestle, I mean, flow down the river of life, I will enjoy the quiet sections of the river, revel in flailing through waterfalls (the life-changing parts), and let the current carry me to (hopefully) ever more fantastic realms: new novels, new ideas, new projects, to watching the children grow and change, to growing old and happy with Dar, to bettering myself.

I feel inspired already. Happy new year everyone!

Whenever a holiday approaches, I feel my luck in living close to so many members of my family. My gratitude is mixed with some sadness, because of course not everyone I love lives so near. My grandmother, my aunt and uncles, many cousins, my brother, his wife and their newborn baby — they all live in Israel. I also have family scattered around the United States. But my parents and my sister and her family live here, and their presence is a constant source of joy in my life.

Hanukkah is one of my favorite holidays. It lasts eight whole days and is full of lights, fabulous fatty foods, and songs. What could be better? I love to watch my sister’s three kids and my two, their faces lit with a childhood’s wonderment and awe, as all of us sing the holiday songs together, bursting into laughter as we mess up, yet again, the canon “Mi yemalel gvurot yisrael,” or as someone forgets the right words to “Maoz tzur,” or as somebody burst into “Sevivon sov sov sov” just as all the rest begin with “Hanukiyya sheli.”

This Hanukkah my parents are in Israel, visiting my brother and my grandmother (who is turning 95!). For the first four days of the holidays my kids were with their dad. Dar and I lit the first candle together on the menorah that my grandfather had built and which my grandmother had used for many years in her home preschool. I taught Dar how to sing the blessings and started him on the complicated “Maoz Tzur.” I didn’t make latkes or the holiday doughnuts, but we watched the candles flickering and took pictures, and I sang the songs.

The second and fourth nights we celebrated with my sister’s family. My sister’s husband has a great voice and his mother was a school teacher, and the three of us sang all the songs, with some help from my sister (who I think was born with a unique sense of hearing that not everyone can appreciate), her kids and her husband’s father. We had latkes and sufganiyot and felt that it was really a holiday.

Tonight Uri and Eden will be with us as well, and then we’ll take our Hanukiyot with us and fly to Roatan Island in Honduras to continue the celebration there. I feel a little sad that our travel plans prevent us from fully celebrating the holiday as my perfect vision would have liked. But I am bringing the menorahs and enough candles with us, and a CD with all the songs to keep us in voice, and we’re going to have a great time.

I am not sure if our hotel on Roatan will have wifi, or if I will have time to blog in the busy schedule of having fun. I wish you all a happy Hanukkah and a happy new year, and I’ll see you again in 2012. Have a wonderful, fabulous, fantastic, great time!

Only a few more days remain till the end of 2011. It had been a heck of a year.

I wrote a lot. Sent out queries. Felt sure I would get my book out this year. Handled rejections (and I’m proud to say that I handled them relatively well). I started three new books, one of which is a romance novel and is flowing like a waterfall from my mind. I also started this blog!

I traveled a lot. Went to Yosemite, Tahoe, Israel, Henry Coe State Park, New York, Asilomar, Big Basin, San Luis Obispo County, Catalina Island, LA, Harbin, and Kauai. Dar and I were going to hike the John Muir Trail for three weeks, and that might still happen in 2012!

I met Dar, broke up with him twice, and finally decided he was my soul mate, never to be separated from again (especially if he continues doing the laundry, cooking, washing the dishes, and planting in the yard).

I had my usual up and down year with the kids, a lot of worrying, obsessing, driving, yelling, reading, playing, hugging.

So let’s see, where was I? I wrote a lot, traveled a lot, loved a lot, yelled a lot. Sounds like a heck of a year, does it not?

I am proud of my year. It had not been easy. I have had some trials. There were nights I couldn’t sleep from stress and days spent crying. Sitting today at my desk in the new office Dar had arranged for us, looking out at the green carpet beginning to grow under the oaks, listening to my crazy dogs bark at who knows what, I feel a bigger, better person than I was on January 1st, 2011. I like this new and improved Sigal. I hope she’ll stick around for us to get acquainted.

There are many things I wish for in 2012: an agent to represent me, to grow closer with Dar, hike the John Muir Trail, the Cross-Catalina Trail, and the Tahoe Rim Trail. I’d like to go to Hawaii’s Big Island and stay at Holualoa Inn again. To have wonderful moments with the children, reading to them, working with them, having fun with them. I’d like to grow as a mother and watch the kids grow ever taller, wiser, lovelier. I’d like to send out shana tova cards this year, read more books, let my ideas flow into writing and become new worlds, enjoy Friday nights with my family, spend time with my parents, with my sister and her kids. So many things!

I wish myself and all of you a happy new year. A year of inner joy and love. A year of self development and growth. Another year to look back upon with pride. May our homes be filled with laughter and our hearts with contentment. May we never lack for new ideas and desires. And may all our wishes happily, joyfully, excitedly come true.

Yesterday I walked to the cafe on the bay to get some breakfast for us. While I waited for the food, I started talking to a grandfatherly man who was peacefully sipping coffee outside. I told him how much we loved the town and asked whether everybody there was as nice as the people we had met. Los Osos had all kinds, he said, and told me about the main source of contention in the town:

Across the bay is a grove of eucalyptus trees, and eucalyptus trees, though beautiful, have several points against them: they are messy, nothing can grow under them, and they are not native to California. There are people in Los Osos who fight to have the eucalyptus cut down and native trees planted in their stead.

Eucalyptus trees were brought to California during the Gold Rush by well-meaning Australians who thought the wood could be used for railroad tracks (it can’t). The trees love the weather here, and it turns out they are useful as windbreakers. They are fast growing, and can get as tall as 65 feet in 50 years.

I looked over to the grove and felt sad. I do not like the idea of cutting down trees — any tree. I happen to be very fond of eucalyptus, their musty smell and the rustling shade they provide remind me of the eucalyptus forest in my childhood town. Also, as a non-native species to California myself, I wonder: when does an exotic species become native?

There are so many examples like the eucalyptus. It is very popular to hate the yellow oats which cover the hills and choke the wildflowers, but they came here with the Spaniards, almost 250 years ago! At Henry Coe State Park the administration thought for a while to remove the dams the ranchers had built and release the water from the park’s many lakes and ponds. But these dams have been there for years and years, and the animals have learned to depend on the constant source of water. The question arises what is exactly the original or natural condition of the land?

Change. We love to resist it, don’t we? We always think it was better once upon a time, before the change had come. Life was so much better before the oats and the dams, before Chinese food and eucalyptus trees and before all those crazy immigrants. California must have been beautiful before the Dinosaur settlers stomped on all the native plants. Not that we’d know. Back then there were no people around.

Our world changes all the time. It really does. Mind you, I am a firm believer in taking care of our land and helping species survive. But I’m also trying to remind me, you, all of us, that even the most native species were exotic once upon a time.

In honor of Dar’s birthday and our first anniversary, Dar and I decided to go on a romantic getaway near San Luis Obispo in the quiet community of Los Osos. Today, after two days spent wandering about the area, looking in galleries, eating fish tacos and canoeing under the shadow of Morro Rock, we went to visit Chris, who is responsible for keeping me honest and organized in life and lives on Dancing Deer Farm. Whenever Chris comes to the Bay Area she tells me I must come and visit the farm. “You’ll love it,” she promised. So we told her we’d be in the area, and she invited us to join the farm’s holiday party today.

The drive up through highway 46 was beautiful, crossing straight over the hills (on the way back we caught the sunset as it painted the sky a glorious crimson red). Though we had meant to be fashionably late, we found ourselves at the farm right on the dot. Chris, surprised at our promptness, asked us to wait twenty minutes. “Make yourself at home, walk around,” she said. And so we did. Wandering through oak forest and meadow, we met a nice man who recommended following the trails, a family of deer, and Dr. Peter Huber, who had started Dancing Deer Farm.

The farm stretches on some 80 acres and is a non profit organization whose goal, according to their website, is to provide “shared growth and support through a balanced and conscious style of life as well as reconnection with nature.” Dr. Peter Huber welcomed us kindly, offering us a place to stay at the farm, but we explained we already had a room in Los Osos. Once Chris arrived, she took us on a tour, showing us the Hacienda, a lovely structure that hosts yoga and other retreats, the organic garden, yoga room, the chicken coop, and the Cakery (we got to sample some cupcakes during the party and they were good!).

Chris told us that Peter has helped many people, providing them with a home on the property in exchange for work till they could get back on their feet. Peter tried to compliment Chris about the help which she had given him, but she clearly felt more comfortable honoring him than the other way around! Why is it so much easier to give compliment than receive them? Chris has done a lot for me this year too — amazing stuff! I don’t know what I would have done without her, and I’m glad I don’t need to know!

What a wonderful visit! But the best part is yet to come. Chris’ friend Rebecca is a chocolatier at Sweet Earth Chocolates and has brought us a box of truffles as a gift. We savored the four truffles inside the golden box: an aztec truffle, spicy and warm, an orange truffle, tangy in the mouth, a chocolate truffle, creamy and soft, and a hazelnut truffle, perfectly satisfying.

Once upon a time, before I met my friend Bridget (who started quite a lot of bad habits in me), I used to have one or two pairs of shoes, cross trainers which I wore for every occasion. Then Bridget came along, and now my shoe closet is full to the brim and overflowing with high heel shoes, boots, flats, and the usual cross-trainers (though now I own more than one). I still wear the same pair of shoes all the time: a well-worn pair of Merrell pace gloves which I love, but having options in case of emergencies or special occasions is fun!

So yes, I think shoes are very important to a woman’s life (and possible to a man, as well). But in Jessica Day George’s Dragon Slippers, shoes are important to everyone: men, women, and dragons. In fact, they are the trigger around which the entire plot revolves!

I finished reading Jessica Day George’s Dragon Slippers a couple days ago and enjoyed it very much. It’s a light and easy read, and I read through it fast. The novel follows the story of Creel, an orphan peasant girl. Creel’s aunt decides to sacrifice her to the village dragon in the hope that somebody might rescue, marry, and altogether take Creel off the aunt’s hands. Instead, Creel makes a bargain with the dragon and gets a pair of shoes (shoes! Notice where this is going!) from him for the road. Creel does not intend to go back home. She wants to go the big town, where the palace is, and make her fortune by weaving and embroidering.

Creel makes friends easily, befriending not only the girls in the shop where she finds work, but a dragon, the youngest prince, and the prince’s bodyguard. She also makes enemies fast — or at least gets on the wrong side of the foreign princess about to marry the royal heir. Many adventures befall Creel, because even though she refuses to see it, the shoes she received from the dragon are magic. The foreign princess knows and wants them. The dragons know, but prefer to keep Creel ignorant. Only once she loses the shoes does Creel finally understand how important they are, and now her world is turned upside down as she realizes she could lose all her new friends unless she gets those shoes back!

I find it funny that both Jessica Day George books I read so far have a lot to do with shoes. In Midnight Ball (which I wrote about here) the whole hullabaloo starts because the princesses wear out their dance shoes every night. In Dragon Slippers Creel’s shoes possess a strange power over the dragons without which the conflict of the novel would not exist. Jessica Day George wrote several other novels, and I wonder if the theme of significant shoes continues in them. If I find the answer, I’ll be sure to let you know.