Happy 2011

I just KNOW 2011 is going to be great. I do not feel this every year. I did not feel this last year. But this year I feel it.

Each year everyone in the family puts their resolutions/goals/dreams in a dream box I made years ago at the Skirball Noah's Ark exhibit. We write them in January, the check them in December. All of us do it. Last year I had accomplished fewer of my goals than I could remember in recent history. It didn't feel so great. There were reasons. Benji was bored out of his mind at Canyon School. It was the end of an era and I felt nostalgic. I began laying groundwork for things that will happen this year, but have not happened yet so they do not feel complete. Check off-able.

This year I hope I will run the LA Marathon, start a community newspaper, and take my boys to Italy--because they are the age I was when I lived there. And the place changed my life. The light, the food, the spirit is in me, and I want it to be in them, too--even if in a different way. I also hope we will travel to Baja to see the baby whales. It is a big trip, a time-consuming trip, and under the current political and economic conditions, perhaps a dangerous trip. But I want to drive to the end of the world, set up a tent, go out in a little boat with some Mexican naturalists, and watch the mama whales nudge their babies up to the boat. For me, this is one of the great wonders of the world, like seeing the Monarchs in Morelia, and I want to go before the world gets too polluted and sick to support the whales anymore.

I am the kind of person who scours the world for inspiring quotes. Because words, music, art and nature are the places from which I draw my inspiration. I can return to them when I am sad and they give me such strength. So here is my quote for 2011, cribbed from another web site (the happiness project) where it was excerpted from an interview with a British author, who quotes his favorite Japanese psychotherapist (who knew there WERE any Japanese psychotherapists???):

"Give up on yourself. Begin taking action now, while being neurotic or imperfect, or a procrastinator or unhealthy, or lazy, or any other label by which you inaccurately describe yourself. Go ahead and be the best imperfect person you can be and get started on those things you want to accomplish before you die."

--Shoma Morita

Perhaps this quote is appealing to me because I am a) a perfectionist b) feeling all my imperfections and c) now in the second half of my life, so I think about the end-point.

How about you, brilliant readers. Do you have a quote to hold onto for 2011? Will you send it to me? Will you share? What gives you strength when you are stumbling, moving forward, dreaming, acting?

Share your wisdom. Post your quote here!