I couldn’t really tell you why I’ve had nothing to say. It isn’t that I haven’t thought things but I just haven’t thought them through to having something to say. I’ve been watching, observing but just haven’t seen things in the blog light.

Now, I have to tell you (and if you are a blogger, you no doubt already know this), often you can see things as a blog post as they happen. And artistry is really in the seeing. Only if you see it can you write it, or draw it, or paint it (or hire someone else to carry out your vision) – but vision is the key. Vision is also the key to a life – to have a vision of what your life can be and then live it toward that.

And so I saw how my back hurt and how I noticed that and figured out why it was and mitigated it through conscious living and thought, oh, that could be a blog post about how one creates health, even as one confronts the challenges of getting older. I saw how #1 daughter noticed that the birthday boy’s breakfast was going to be interrupted by something that couldn’t be helped and planned and created and carried out a magnificent birthday breakfast that his father and I couldn’t do for him, and thought, oh, that would be a magnificent blog post about the results of unschooling and living as an “all for one, one for all” farm family. And I saw us all tramping through the cold and snow and ice in the dark carrying everything with us only to get to a cold house without a fire and how rather than hardship this was the high life of adventure and togetherness and I thought, oh well, people never ever understand that. I have seen the changes we have made through the years and thought about how change, to be real, must be cumulative and not just a pose for show and thought about trying to write about that but . . . how?

I did see a drawing I want to draw. I don’t really draw, and I certainly don’t know how to draw but I do know what I saw and I’d like to see if I could capture it a little – those lines of the face that reveal the person and the beauty of life. This is the year, you know, that I will be fifty. And I don’t really have any expectations for that. It is a lot like how I came in to having a family – not having any idea what it would be like and so being open to how it was and all the possibilities of what it could be. I have found that I am essentially the same person that I was at 6 and at 13 and at 28 and 46 and every other age. I am ageless, timelessness, lace and fineness, I’m beauty and . . . wait, that’s a song lyric. I am privileged and blessed. My dimples are also turning to creases and that is part and parcel.

I may be quiet but I’m still here.

I see very clearly, very starkly, that what is known as “the economy” is built on oil, on transporting everything everywhere, and its keystone is what is known as “growth”, ever expansion because the present is only paid for by the future. It really doesn’t take a genius to figure out that that isn’t going to work forever, and isn’t going to work at all with expensive oil. It doesn’t take a genius to see that it really hasn’t ever worked at all and only the opiate of consumption, of appearances, has misled people to believe it works for them. But say things like that and people just blink and stare – they are rather addicted to their opiate of consumption.

Take instead the lesson of the service berries this year: food is hiding all around you.

and just to note, now all that ice just off the porch and on the paths right around the house? It melted then refroze into a very smooth sheet, and now it has about 8 inches of snow on top of that! There have been some pratfalls, and you should watch chickens when they slide! (and you thought the duck slide at the county fair was something)