(January 31, 2020/ Photo: Jorge Ibanez)

As I come to the end of an amazing year of revelations, discoveries, agonizing indecisions and huge acts of faith and acceptance, I sense a world of new horizons opening ahead of me.

For one, I am wrapping a yearlong exploration of breads, bread baking and techniques, my previous love, that was meant to balance and give meaning to my life as I struggled with a difficult universe into which I had voluntarily plunged. Now, I come to the end of that delicious effort at the same time I finally gather the courage to extricate myself from that ‘marasmus’  that had stopped being exciting and promising. Fifty two breads in fifty two weeks. Done.

And then, there is the extrication itself. A ripping out of very deep soul fabric rending, of painful acceptance and TKO recovery, of turning around and self rediscovery looking under the stones and finding a lost universe. In process.

So, one year done and gone and one beginning and inviting. And my one original love, my first love that was the center of my daily existing for long and long ago and that I had practically programmatically buried as I worked hard at becoming a technocrat, is beaconing the me coming out of the cocoon. And I am gluttonously diving into a new year of reading. Reading again about history, philosophy, faith, politic. As of today, I have gone through two books by Pico Iyer (Autumn Light and The Art of Stillness) and am almost half through One Long River of Song by Brian Doyle, which I enthusiastically recommend. And I am also embracing the Kindle experience, which Wanda has been burning all last year reading a monumental number of Kindle edition versions of all kinds of books. A new experience for me, in my little cracked screen Pixy tablet.

Although I can not even pretend to read at Wanda’s speed (here I must confess that the reason is that I frequently run into a sentence or turn of phrase that captures me in a special way and I go into a consideration of a hundred and one related considerations of things to consider…. you get it..), I am hoping for a voracious year of voracious reading. My heart is pleasantly expectant.

But one goal I am setting for myself in my catholic ritualistic disciplined penance (it would be too fun without some disciplined methodology, you know, a sin) is to complete in one year the political history books list that one of my daughters in law (one day I have to write about these two amazing and so different women) put together for me as a Xmas gift after Trump’s victory. It was then planned as a history course with discussion groups and all (before they moved out of town), all in the hopes of helping me understand how such an aberration of history was even possible, her way of helping me manage my nausea inducing shock and in the process prove to me that my explanation was wrong. She loves to prove that I am wrong regardless of the subject. It’s a lot of fun. I am very appreciative. And patient, I mean, she is smart.

I was supposed to receive the next book in the list once the current one was read and discussed. There were visions of wine fueled intellectual liberal artsy discussions dancing in our heads…. I was not ready then and only got through half of the first one, Staying Alive. And then back to Javascript.

This time I am making a full commitment to do it just to see if it helps me deal with the upcoming confirmation of one of the most shameful moments in the history of the republic. But then I plan to balance the serious somber readings (that’s how I envision them in my near future…) with the likes of Iyer and Doyle, Twain and Alan Watts, Vallejo and Frost, Marcus Aurelius and Swami Pranayomama….