Resolve

(again and again)

Here I sit again, watching the morning light, with the dog right next to me and coffee very close by. This time, there are sounds of cooking in the kitchen, soon to be delicious smells and tastes.

2025 was quite a year. Relentless. Like Nandor, because it never relented. Not entirely true. It did relent a few times.

The year has included a couple of surgeries for my dear husband, chemo for him as well, and one mean immunological drug to fight his cancer that I still cannot pronounce (and also hate), which has dramatically chased us to the end of this year. Chased meaning, it caused several bouts of acute “itises” of various organs, and a brief hospital stay.

It also included a few film festivals, which premiered and featured a film he produced, “Raising Aniya.” This was a wonderful pinnacle moment, and it was joyful to see him reap some rewards for that hard work. We went to D.C. for the premiere, which was bittersweet considering “DGEOEGE” was rampaging through the government buildings while we were there. We took the time to see the essential sites of democracy. And cherry blossoms. Those were beautiful.

My work front has been exceptionally challenging; oddly, in a good way. I feel clearer about myself at least, that’s what I mean. Nonprofits are beginning to suffer from the shutdown of federal funding, trickling to state funding, increased asks then diverted to private foundations, which cannot give what is needed to everyone who needs.

If you and your nonprofit business don’t have your financial ducks in a row, could you get them cleaned up now? Please? Things will get harder, and money will be increasingly complex to come by, and that means if there are any “fault lines” in the landscape of your business, well…earthquakes hit hard. Boards? Get involved now. Be there for each other, be there for your staff. Align with each other and the mission. Be a team. Still, I have learned much from this year, which builds nicely on the lessons learned the year before. It’s hard work, but it’s essential.

In lovelier news, I went to a fabulous writing retreat on the coast. It was soulful and healing. Six people, a beach house, foggy mornings and sunny afternoons, and nothing but writing prompts and time.

Here’s my favorite from that short stint:

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How do I make my life mine?

Freedom is sometimes in the little things, what you get to do for you alone when no one is watching, but without the bigger picture of room to breathe, or to create, or to just be seen, it’s not quite enough. And yet, Freedom is not an excuse to run rampant over everything and everyone. He loved the muse until it killed him.

My heart would always pang as I drove over the I-5 Bridge towards downtown Seattle, and especially more at night, with wet shine, glossy neon, and bright sparks of reflection in the dark, the dark at 5 pm, it was otherworldly to me, no matter how many times I drove. Now, the pang of light. Carlotta’s garden in full bloom is a master gardener’s dream, with fig and iris and blueberry bushes, bird feeders, hummingbirds darting, and the sound of water rushing through the stream, a highway for the neighborhood’s nocturnal residents.

I want to tell you how much I love you, but that phrase seems so overused, and I’m so scared of what it means. Watching you in pain, I’m reminded that the absence of pain is the best feeling of all, and you can have everything, but if your body hurts, it pulls you out of joy. How do I help create a life with less pain? How do I trust in God when all this mess is going on? God may be above us, looking down, or around us, looking in, but a friend of mine said God was the space between two people, and that seems right to me.

My name means “youthful and downy” like a little bird, I suppose.

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The boys have done well, with jobs, work, school, and lovely partners. My in-laws are doing well. My friends are lovely and loving. The pets work gently to both amuse and attend to us.

I was delighted to smell the fragrance of a summer ponderosa pine in Bend. That is a pinnacle memory for me.

I lost someone this year. Someone who helped raise me after my father died. She was a very difficult person, and I had a very difficult relationship with her. Complicated. But also, this should be simple, how we treat each other. With kindness and gentleness and fairness. And that wasn’t always the case. Much left unresolved. Her death left me thinking a great deal about childhood and dynamics and what I want out of my last third.

Thus.

The name of this newsletter is new. And old. Story to come, but words, and readers, and people, and systems, and leadership, and culture, and questions are all tiny lemon stars to me, wrapped up into a funny, grubby little bouquet. Not neat and tidy, but mine (and yours) nonetheless.

I will not miss much of 2025, but I will savor the moments of vanillin in the bark of trees, the glee of watching Chris in D.C. with the Raising Aniya team, the release of words onto the screen after so much time with writing absent, the blurry lights of our very perfect Christmas tree early in the morning, dark and holy.

“I resolve to let things make sense.” I said this last year, and this year I also resolve to let things be a hot mess of nonsense, because sometimes you make sense of things after the fact.

“I resolve to be who I am.” I say this last year, for I always was this person, and why not keep being her, because she’s great and lovely and deserves to keep being all the things. And this year, I also resolve to…understand I am becoming something, someone new.

“I resolve to live without waiting.” I say this to myself right now. And I also say that there is much waiting still to come, so living through it is the only thing anyone can actually do.

“I resolve to own my desires and my calling. I resolve to fight.” I say this for the years to come, because there is so much fight to come: for my husband, for democracy, for nonprofits, for groups of people just trying to figure things out. For community. It all matters. It’s the whole bouquet, really.

make yourself a damn joy jar while you are at it

Last night, we crafted jars to collect notes of joy and consistency. Here’s to a winter’s rest, and to spring rebirth.