Closing down one year and turning the page to another always makes me a simmering mess of melancholy and excited, reliving sweet memories, shuddering at hard memories, anticipating and apprehensive and curious about what’s next.

Writing things out helps unscramble the mass of the months and moments, sifts the favorites from the non-favorites, and reminds me of what is true.

Here is a sanitized, public-reader-appropriate list of 2018’s high points. Those closest to me know the crazy and the agony parts, the hysterical and impossible and guffawing and sparkling moments that we shared this year. But that stays with us, not the world-wide web.

This list is neither chronological nor ordered in priority, but savored, round and round, like pearls on a string.

2018

• Introducing 40 women to doodling at a women’s retreat. Helping them find their inner artist.
• Traveling to KS with friends and singing in a concert for Nelson & Hannah’s wedding
• Tea with mentor friends, late, after an age-long day. Tears. Decision. Unutterable peace.
• Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert by Rosaria Butterworth
• 2 visits to NYC
• A Makers Weekend where a pile of friends made stuff and talked and ate food and talked and talked
• A late-night invitation to neighbors on my birthday. Fire and jackets and stories. Laughter and star light.
• Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
• A week auditing a Christian anthropology class in a seminary.
• A week in Greece. Sunshine. Sunshine. Sunshine. Sunshine. Swimming. Family. Unbelievable food. Sunshine.
• This concert of peace. In the heat of summer. In the front row. Healing tears dripping off my chin.
• Thanksgiving Sunday. Carnegie Hall. Messiah. 500 voices.
• Connections in my new church, surprising and sweet.
• An Ola Gjeilo concert where the composer was the accompanist and we heard him improv “Ubi Cartitas” with music heard only that one time.
• Rings of friends, arriving alone or in dozens, in our living room. Rollicking laughter. Stories. Art parties. Tea.
• Educated by Tara Westover
• Friends who took me in as one of their family. Different states. Different occasions. So much love.

2018 brought me choking anxiety and peace, sobs and shrieking laughter, a staggering, preposterous torrent of blessings, joy, and love so deep and so tall, there is no way to measure or describe it.
This reality, of living surrounded by love, tells me to walk into 2019, hands opened wide for more.