I am absolutely in love with Daily Om. This blurb below is from my daily horoscope (Pisces), but it is relevant to my recent posts and the posts of others around the blogging world as we reflect on ‘06 and look toward ‘07. If you are already a member of Daily Om or are planning on joining, my user name is peacespring.

We can hone our level of awareness by actively listening to, and then heeding, the intuitive messages we receive from our inner selves. Hearing this wisdom from within can be difficult as there are many forces vying for our attention in the modern world. Yet the time we spend learning to nurture stillness in our souls is indeed time well-spent because it is from this quiet font that all of our innate understanding flows forth.

As we gain a greater comprehension of the meaning underpinning our feelings, we are able to utilize our initial emotional responses to aid us in the decision-making process. We need never second-guess ourselves or doubt our knowledge of self as we have trained ourselves well. You will grow more conscious today as you search inside of yourself for the wisdom you need to prosper in your inner- and outer-world affairs.

I’m a sucker for resolutions. It’s just who I am, and I find new starts to be a very good thing for people. It’s one of the few times in the calendar year when we can all slow down just a bit and recognize what we can do to make our lives, and the lives of those around us, a little better.

My resolutions this year are a little different than in previous years. My children are at an age now where my successes and failures are very apparent to them (especially H, who’s now 10). Therefore, my resolutions focus more on outcomes for the greater family rather than for me.

That’s not to say that I will not be achieving the personal goals I set for myself; on the contrary, if I meet my greater outcomes, it almost certainly means that I’ve met my personal goals as well. Logically, it would seem that, to succeed for my family, I will need to succeed myself.

So…here they are, in no particular order.

1. I don’t need to write more; I need to publish more of what I write. With the exception of a few weeks where I didn’t do much writing at all at the end of 2006, I am fairly happy with the quantity and the quality of my writing. Now I need to get my work out there. I need to find an agent who can represent both my fiction and my nonfiction writing. I need to get my work out there, circulating, and I need to get paid for it.

2. I need to be home more with my family. I love teaching, and I love where I am teaching, but writing allows me to be home with them much more, and the amount of travel I do when I teach is just too much on me. There are times when I feel as if I am separated from my family, and I get a week with them at Christmas and two months during summer, and that’s it. People keep telling me, That’s Life…get over it. But I can’t get over the fact that I rarely see my family. It’s time for writing to be my primary and teaching my secondary. This puts me home more in 2007, especially later in the year, where I need to be.
3. We need to move. We’ve outgrown our townhouse, and our children need a yard. They need space to play freely and safely in a world they can call their own.

4. I need to continue on my spiritual path toward health and healing. I cannot allow the rush of the busy academic semester coming up to derail me, as it always seems to do. I need to hold on to this discipline, this ritual, this structure, and heal myself so that I may better serve others.

5. All this, I need to do with patience and with understanding. With love and with care, with hope and with belief that all things are possible…

The upcoming new year will undoubtedly bring many highs and lows for us; it’s what we do with them that matters. The Tao says let it flow. Let it all flow, the good, the bad, the mediocre. Let it come, let it go. Offer no resistance to it, and it will do no harm. I’d like to think that, with this short list of resolutions for 2007, this way of thinking, of living, will be possible.

May we all find the strength and the love to make this year all that we know it can be!

“Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth… But amusing? Never.”

–Edna Ferber

I am just beginning to understand the depth and the genuine meaning of this quote. I have spent so much of my life on the non-published side of writing, where there was amusement experienced in all that I did in the world of writing: where I would write, what pen I would use, which daybook was best, when the best time of the day was to write.

I don’t find any of these aspects of writing trivial; I think they are all necessary if they contribute to the full balance of the writer’s world. If, however, they are what defines the writer’s world, then there is great imbalance. The reason they are called amateurs is simply because that is what they remain–a person not compensated for his or her work.

It’s the attention and energy we give to other side of writing that makes the difference. For years, I have made the claim that I am a writer–and I am one by definition. In the past decade I have published over 75 pieces in local, regional, and national publications. However, I have yet to cross that all-important, yet quite invisible line of sustaining any real income with my writing.

This is where the amusement ends for me. Publishing those 75+ pieces has been good fun. Those jobs have brought in $100 or so mostly, maybe $250 every once in a while. Nothing above that, though.

I’ve stopped the Merry-Go-Round. Pulled the plug on the whole park.

I’m at work now, ditch digging and mountain climbing, and I’ve never been happier about being dis-amused.

:)

(To “Looks Like Rain,” from The Dead’s 12/29/77 show at Winterland)
On my desk rests a helicopter, broken in two places where my wife stepped on it yesterday afternoon. It rests, on its side, with one half of its landing gear nearby; next to the black piece of plastic is the wooden shank once holding the back propeller. All three pieces rest in the shadow of a bottle of Elmer’s Wood Glue and a thin tube of Instant Krazy Glue, still in its original package, waiting to be put into service. In a few hours, I’ll apply the glues, turn three pieces of toy into one once again, and let it rest for another 24 hours before letting it fly once again. It seems all too simple, really, to fix what is broken.

Wouldn’t life be just a little different if that’s all it took to mend the broken parts? I a little dab of Elmer’s and a drop or two of Krazy Glue?

I’ve been up most of the night with my five year old. She is trying her best to fight off the cold her younger brother gave her, but her defenses are not strong enough. At around 3 this morning, she and her immune system succumbed to the bug, and she spent the remaining hourse of pre-dawn light throwing up, pleading for sleep to find her once again, and wanting nothing more than the burning pain in her throat to go away.

Nothing to do but hold her through it while my wife did her best to keep little Braeden asleep. If he would have awakened, it would have done us in completely.

So, I’m back. To be honest, I didn’t really want to write this morning, but I can feel myself slipping into a lazy, self-piteous way, and I know I’ve got to do a better job at disciplining myself to stay focused this week. The one side of me tells me to take it easy, finish reading that better-than-ok book by Stephen King (Lisey’s Story); the other side tells me that I’m being a lazy bum and I need to stay focused if I’m ever going to do something substantial with my writing.

What motivates me most, of course, is my children. I want them to have the security that I have not yet provided them, and I want them to have some pretty good experiences while they are still in their younger years. There’s a house that I’m pining after in one of the local historic districts, and I keep thinking about how right it would be for us to live there. It’s modest in many ways, but it’s got the yard we’ve been wanting for them, and it certainly has more space for us to spread out (and definitely at least 4 bedrooms, which is an absolute necessity now that we’re a family of five).

So, I need to discipline myself to get there. To make it happen. To kick it up another notch with my writing and get to that historic house with the bigger yard and the 4+ bedrooms (oh, please let there be just one more room for my writing room).

That’s why I’m just back, I think. The blog’s probably going to be of a different tone as I try a few things out, so please be patient with me as I work through this.

I’m glad i wrote this morning. . . .(”Minglewood Blues” closes me out for this entry…)

I won’t spoil the fun for you….go to www.jkrowling.com, click on the eraser, and poke around to open the door (no more do not disturb sign!!!)….

It all starts with the door at the back of the mirror…..

I cannot believe it!!!!

5:03 p.m.

Wow. I haven’t done a 15/Five in a long time…I miss these short missives, but I’ve not written them simply b/c I haven’t been on the computer at these times on a routine basis…Perhaps I should change the name to 15 On the Hour…

What’s new?

~~Started The Phoenix Society at school today. It’s a club exclusively designed for Harry Potter readers who have read books 1-6 at least once. We’ll discuss our own theories of how book 7 will turn out as we re-read the books in order every 2-4 weeks after winter break concludes. The students are *extremely* excited, as am I. After finishing Half-Blood, I felt such a great need to pal up with any person who would discuss the books thus far…There’s a lot of 6-book readers out there, but there are too many that have not read all six books, and so it gets very frustrating having to be careful with what I do and do not share about the books…Hey, I understand. As of last week, I was in their place as well. I still can’t believe all that happened in the last 200 pages of HBP…

~~I talked with my sister Cindy today in Florida. She’s in the hospital for another day or two as they wait for her “numbers” to stabilize enough after this last round of nasty, nasty chemo. This ride on the other side of her surgery was supposed to be an easy one, and already she’s found herself teetering on the edge of life and death three times. She’s come to know the crash cart outside her room as “the happy cart” instead…Her spirit is of heroic proportions….

~~I’m looking forward to a great family weekend. With no papers to grade and the house looking clean, it should be a pretty relaxing time to sit back, drink our Guinness and Wassail, and look at all the frantic fools blowin’ their horns outside our house along the busy, busy roads….

~~I also get time this weekend to see if I can get images to load on my blog again. Flickr expired, for some reason (I didn’t know it was a trial thing), and I still cannot find a way to get my cool buttons on my sidebar. I’m telling you, I am not very bright when it comes to web stuff…

~~Oh! We had our first flurry of snow last night! It was just enough to kiss the green grass white, but it was a whirlwind of fun nonetheless. I had the good fortune of waiting outside my daughter’s gym when the snows came, and I was thrilled to see the delight in each child’s face as she came out the front door to find Mom or Dad waiting in the parking lot. Each one squealed with wander and then ran back inside screaming for her bestest friend (in the whole wide world) to come out and see the snow. of course, the natural question that followed was, Do you think we’ll have school tomorrow? Honestly…a flurry or two really sends this state into an emergency crisis. It’s embarrassing how the news media provide “team coverage” for such “winter weather events” whenever the temperature drops below freezing.

~~One final thing: we’ll be taking the Family VanWestervelt portrait this weekend for holiday greetings to one and all…if I am fortunate enough to be graced with the goodness and power to put a picture or two on my blog, I’ll share with all of you just how beautiful my three lovely children are!

5:19 p.m….Time to call this post a Wrap. :)

Michelle answered these questions a few days ago, and so I thought I’d give ‘em a go as well. I need to warm up, anyway, for Carl’s G.I.F.T. Challenge!

1. Egg Nog or Hot Chocolate? Funny, but my default response was to answer in Latte mode (how sad is that?). So…I think I’ll modify my answer–but only slightly. I like Egg Nog straight up, but not in the latte format, and in very small doses. Hot Chocolate, however, when prepared with milk and tons of marshmallows and drizzled with caramel, is my absolute fave.

2. Does Santa wrap presents or just sit them under the tree? What? Santa doesn’t wrap the presents for everyone? Is there something that somebody is not telling me?

3. Colored lights on tree/house or white? The tree is adorned with red and white lights (we’re having a fit right now that the white lights are on a white string–what were they thinking?). Outside, anything goes. We have white. We have red. We have green. We have blinkies. We have lights, Lights LIGHTS!!!!

4. Do you hang mistletoe? There are random mistletoe sightings throughout our house, but kisses are never contingent upon the placement of interior shrubbery.

5. When do you put your decorations up? We begin the day after Thanksgiving, but it usually takes us a week to get the tree up and the lights plugged in. Once those two things happen, there’s no holding us back through New Year’s Day.

6. What is your favorite holiday dish, excluding dessert? My wife makes a killer Autumn Pudding. I know, I know; it sounds like a dessert, but it is really a phenomenal sweet potato creation that sends its consumer into the next stratosphere with unrelenting delight… Yum!

7. Favorite holiday memory as a child? Without a doubt, it is waking up very, very early with my sister on Christmas morning, and the two of us shaking gifts for hours before our parents woke up (or before we woke them up…). Now, being a dad myself, I have to think that my parents always knew that we were up, and they were just clinging to as much peace and quiet as they could until we rocked them out of bed…

8. When and how did you learn the truth about Santa? Truth? Oh–Um, it was actually an indirect discovery. A week before Easter, I was cutting wood with my dad, and I said to him, “Dad, there’s no such thing as the Easter bunny, is there?” He answered, and I realized it was an across-the-board type of coming-of-age, loss-of innocence realization. I then excused myself and told my dad I needed a moment to be alone. I cried a little, then shook it off, and continued chopping wood (a little more aggressively, I daresay). I wasn’t happy at all.

9. Do you open a gift on Christmas Eve? We usually open a gift or two from relatives whom we won’t be with during the holidays…but no other gifts find their way under the tree until after Santa visits…(of course! Duh!).

10. How do you decorate your Christmas Tree? Over the years, our tree has become a collection of the kids’ homemade crafts blending nicely with a few family ornaments that Amy and I have inherited. We drizzle it with silver beads, but no tinsel (no need to tie our kitties’ intestines into shimmery knots…).

11. Snow: Love it or dread it? Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love Love it….

12. Can you ice skate? I thought you’d never ask. My wife introduced me to skating when we first met 13 years ago. I gravitated toward hockey skates, which I became pretty proficient with on the ice. But then we got this cute idea that we could dance on the ice together, and so I switched over to figure skates, where I immediately gravitated toward the ice, time and time again (toepick!). Ah, the lovely memories my soon-to-be wife and I spent on the couch nursing our broken ribs…. :)

Greetings, all:

Notice anything different? I’m testing out a few wintry themes…I think I like this one more than the retro snowflake theme I had up for about 24 hours or so…

I’m really struggling with WordPress and Bluehost, though. I feel so limited as to what I can do. I want to put new buttons in my sidebar, but nothing I do seems to work.

I feel like such a blogging knucklehead! (Blogglehead????)

Sigh. . . .

If anybody out there has any wisdom on the placing of buttons (like the cool winter challenge I am doing from Carl’s coolest-site-ever blog…or my nano winner buttons…), please, do share. :)

Ugh.

Ok. It was an experience. I’ll give it that much.

But to sit in a room for 8 hours without a single jury pool being called for selection?

A major disappointment today as there was complete inaction on behalf of the need for jurors for upcoming trials.

Here’s to a better Friday, all!