Akemashite Omedetou Gozaimasu!

To all of you who do not speak Japanese: Happy New Year!

If you are here I love you, and I thank you for your presence in my life, the gift of your attention in a distracted world.

I had an amazing year. A hard year. A rewarding year. A year of massive change. I know everyone did. At a New Year's Eve party the other night someone called 2011 a two, a zero and two middle fingers. Wow. Mine was not THAT bad.

There are years of crazy change and discrete goals and achievement, of catapulting and shooting to new places and aiming for things you have never done like an arrow sailing towards a target. Then there are years where you maintain, not coasting, but shifting, improving, upping the quality and the ante, being better. I think this year will be that for me. I hope. It is a "be better" year. It is a year to look deep inside and remember the big, long-term goals and slowly shift the Hilary Mother ship back on course.

Here is what I aim for. Not resolutions, exactly, just a roadmap:

To start VoxHollywood (twitter account officially launched today. I can do 160 characters a couple of times a week--I know I can). To manage my monkeymind and stay steady. To do a yoga workshop with Rod Stryker, itinerant yoga guru extraordinaire. To go to England and find the Family Castle. To get better at my job, and to make a difference for the kids of Los Angeles. To grow a great garden. To get a dog. To support my husband. To learn to play the guitar well. To eat more plants. To buy veggies in a bag from school again--and start the program myself if I have to. To make time for friends, and to love them and support them. To dance. A lot. To nurture my boys and enjoy them and spot their unique talents and foster and see and support them. To paint with oils. To save money to take my boys to Naples. To publish four stories somewhere (and my blog does not count) for money. To try to start a book--to be open to any type--to have a project like that. To write and write and write for my life.

You? What do you want to do?

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!