Forward: A New Year's Eve Audio Blog

Background: my painting Across the Universe

(Highlight the text below to see the transcript, if your computer can't play sound clips)

Happy New Year, everyone. Thank you for your care, concern and support in 2011.
xoxo
bru
Strange creatures, we, who begin our day in the middle of the night.

Instead of days turning over with sunrise, light thrown upon the land and all among the trees and hills and rivers and mountains upon it, we strain to see the morning in the blackest dark of midnight.

That makes no sense to me. But then so little in this world makes sense to me.

You’d think it would be better to start a new day, let alone a new year, when you can see where the hell you’re going.

But we don’t. We seek daylight in darkness, even as we seek hope in darkest days.

Twelve AM arrives in waves across the globe, sweeping past already in my heart where it lies and leaving my body lagging behind in another time zone to follow.

We light the night with artifice, beautiful, glimmering color that can (and sometimes does) consume the thing that holds it.

The canvas upon which we paint these colors is still darkness.

Most drink they say to celebrate but I’d wager more to try to forget.

Some like me face the dawning of the new world without the comfort of such dangerous and impossible company; as sober as one with a mind wired for fireworks ever can be. We (I) live in our (my) own perpetual, internal intoxication; a gift and curse, a magic that defies both hope and description though treated with equal parts prayer and prescription. They may try to scare or medicate or therapeutically manipulate it out of us but it remains.

At least, for me.

The new year begins in the darkness of the last night of the darkest year of my life.

It’s already passed by, where it matters to me.

With the coming of midnight in the Eastern Standard Timezone I hope to be sleeping.

Gathering from my dreams, if I can, the strength to find a way forward in the new day, because there is no way back.

Regardless the numbers on the calendar, for me time seems to stand still, frozen on a point from which I must free myself, somehow; repeating to myself again and again six simple words: Forward, for there’s no way back.

Wishing you a year of momentum moving forward in all the right directions in 2012

~bru