Hello Readers

A Very Belated Happy New Year

I’m sure many of you thought I’d disappeared from the face of the earth.

And in a manner of speaking, I did. 

Too much time spent brooding about the state of the world is not a good thing. 

I was also significantly impoverished by pandemic policies and my escape from paradise, and before one can help others one must help oneself.

Over the last six months, I spent time with family, worked very hard, escaped the modern era by listening to copious amounts of older music that provided a more positive vibe, fully enjoyed the outdoors in the seasons on offer, pursued in-person (rather than remote) employment, cultivated a few new relationships, and spent much less time diving into the non-actionable details of that which I’ve long known intuitively to be true.

In my case, this was a wise and healing thing to do. 

As such, I have barely read any Substack entries in the last half year. If you are a writer, I’d love for you to link one or a few highlights from the last year so that I can get caught up with my subscriptions.

And regardless of whether you have an online audience, I would still love to hear how you have been. Please feel free to drop a comment below.

To any who may have tried to contact me via the email address associated with my Substack, I have not received your email, and I do apologize. My domain name and email service were not linked and I only recently modified DNS records to start receiving emails again. 

Please do feel free to re-send any correspondence.

And yes… I will write again. Right now I spend a lot of hours (and overtime hours) working in a fast-paced environment with a lot of people. Although this has been necessary on a variety of levels, this type of environment is not ideal for fostering my creative side, and it really saps my expressive energy. 

Life is settling down a bit now, so I anticipate some more contemplative time to re-energize my creative side.

The following pictures were taken in Virginia Beach on New Year’s Day this year. It was a glorious and unseasonably warm day. 

I’ve always been more of a New Year’s Day than a New Year’s Eve kinda gal and I like to get up early to greet the new year. 

Yes, I know we all might get blown up soon and excess mortality is rising and civilization is collapsing and stuff.

Happy New Year, anyway!