Hemlock B Bootsalotta

I'm sitting here at work and watching the New Year's wishes rolling in. No party for me tonight, but I'm content with that. It was only recently that I even started going to NYE parties -- they always seemed to have an underlying air of desperation that set my teeth on edge. I still won't go to bars on this night.

And as befits the season, I've been thinking about the year behind -- the last few years actually, and where I am now.

2000 was a horrible year for me. I used to joke bitterly that so many people had perpetuated the meme that the world would end in 2000 that the universe was drawn to comply.

It wasn't the beginning the bad stuff but it felt like the focal pont for a lot of it. It was the year that choices felt like mistakes. It was the year feeling like a failure. It was loss and heartbreak and depression and one-fucking-thing-after-another.

It was the one time in my life I have ever felt old.

2001 was the journey from Gevurah to Chesed. Nobody was going to be able to do this for me, I had to get myself out of the place I was in through sheer perversity. My memory of that year is one of miles and miles of plodding through endless desert.

I was alone in the work but never in the journey. Always I had guides and companions, often unexpected ones, who stuck with me in spite of the times of getting lost and dispairing and falling down and all the times it seemed like I had done nothing but make endless circles that took me right back to where I had started.

2002 was the year I looked up and realized that I had made it, that the desert was gone and that I was once again in a cool, fertile beaurtiful place. The shit is still close behind me and I can still smell the scent of burning if the wind is coming from the right direction but it is behind me now.

God, it feels good to be back.

And sometimes when I think about these things I think it must seem an over-dramatic way of describing a crap period in my life, but I don't care. Not all battles are external and not all invaders carry guns. I know I am a different person than I was three years ago.

I lost things. Important, meaningful, sometimes essential things. But blood and tears were the fertilizer for this green place where I am now, and I do not regret those deaths.

Life is good.