New Year, New Beginnings

Well, that's Christmas over with - and it was a very good one down our neck of the woods. We're now standing on the threshold of the new year in a month named after the two-faced god of doorways. We look back - with some degree of nostalgia perhaps, although many of us seem to be glad to be putting 2010 behind us (my sister especially, who's had a bad year, health-wise) - and we look forward, perhaps with excitement at the prospect of a fresh start, perhaps with trepidation because the future is uncertain.

I wanted to share with you these brilliant lines from T.S. Eliot's Little Gidding, which Daisy Hickman posted on Facebook:

'For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice ...
And to make an end is to make a beginning.'

Many of us are reviewing what we did, what we read, what we learned, what we lost - and what we wrote, during the year that's gone. If you're writing, take the time to think about how much progress you made, look at what went well, what didn't go so well, the rejections you perhaps had to assimilate - do all that. Taking stock is important. And feeling proud of what you created - whether it was a whole novel or a four line poem - that too is important. But then ... move on. It's a new year: new beginnings come out of old experience. New words await for your brain to mint them.

I wish you all imaginable riches.