SOLD: Beautiful Happyzine

We all do it, every year we make our list. We call it our ‘New Year’s Resolutions’. You know, eat less, exercise more, read more books, sort ourselves out, take time to stop and smell the roses. We make all kinds of promises on the 1st of January and by the end of February some have already ‘gone out
the window’. So we admonish ourselves and decide to start again, but somewhere between Easter and June we realise that most of our good intentions have ‘gone by the book’.

Which got me thinking, have you ever sat down and thought about what it is you really want. I mean really, really want. Okay I know there was that song the Spice Girls sang but that’s not what I’m talking about. Want is confused a lot with ‘wish’ as in I want a Ferrari (in my case I would settle for a sporty MG), I want a holiday house with a swimming pool, I want to go on a world cruise, I want to be rich!

Has the realisation of what’s important in life and what your priorities are ever hit you? Sit down and search your heart for what it is that would really make you happy! This is actually quite difficult to do but once you are passed the threshold of the ‘wish list’ (as in things that will likely never happen) and the think you ‘need list’ then it’s fairly easy. Of course we all want world peace, children not to go hungry and child labour to cease. However make this exercise about you and what you really, really, want!

During our New Zealand winter I attended a summer school for writers in Vancouver and one of our poetry assignments was to rewrite the last verse of Canadian poet Pat Lowther’s “Random Interview”. This exercise was very therapeutic after the tunnel of despair following the earthquake events in Christchurch.

What I Want for 2012

What I want is to walk backward

to the light – watch the dark leave

ignore the gossamer grabbing

at my hair taste the sudden warmth.

I want to thread my solitary dreams on

a long string & hang them out like crystals

I want to unfurl a magic carpet

dip & dive and trail streamers

I want to splash in pools of sunshine

build sandcastles from my tiny grain of sand

free my ankles from the seething foam

and sprint toward a sanguine ocean.

Tags: new year's