Happy 2015!

Chase Bird allowed me to make one more silly “dress-up” photo of him to wish you all a Happy New Year.

This is a time when many of us resolve to do more, be more, be different, do differently during the next year. I tend to do that, too.

But as I wrote in my journal this morning, I am going to try to remember that we have the opportunity to set new goals, to start over, every single day, every single moment. We don’t have to pressure ourselves to perfectly live up to resolutions we make on any one day.

That said, I am making some plans and setting some goals. What I’d like to share with you today is my word for 2015.

I usually focus on choosing a guiding word for myself in the new year. The word that has come to me over and over is “Quiet.”

I need and crave quiet. I need time to stop the activity, to instead meditate and think and read and learn.

I also need to take quiet to allow the clamor of my thoughts to calm down. That’s not an easy task for me. In many ways, OCD and anxious thoughts—obsessive, relentless, continuous—are more familiar to me than a quiet mindfulness of the moment.

I need quiet to stop obsessing over the past, to stop worrying about the future, and t stop generally staying stuck. I need quiet to figure out how to move forward.

Do you ever find that once you start mulling over something, you begin to find others talking and writing about the same things?

I was fortunate to recently find a wonderful On Being program called “The Last Quiet Places: Silence and the Presence of Everything.” In the program, Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist, is interviewed. The introduction to the program states that Hempton “defines real quiet as presence — not an absence of sound, but an absence of noise.”

Yes! That is what I want to experience. An absence of noise.

I hope 2015 will find me learning ways to experience quiet.

May 2015 be a joyful year for each of you!