Have you ever noticed that most people’s new year’s resolutions are about what they plan to do?  (And let’s not get too picky about the fact that many of us then – somehow – fail to go on to do those things).  This year, I invite you to start the year by reflecting on the how of your life: who or how are you going to be?

The poem below, written by Dawna Markova following her father’s death and from which she takes the title of her book says something of her intentions in the how department:

I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible,
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance,
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom,
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.

Dawna Markova

Also, by Henry David Thoreau, this quote, in which I love the idea of sucking the marrow from the bones of life:

I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, to suck the marrow from the bones of life; to put to rout all that was not life, and not to come to the end of life, and discover that I had not lived.
 
Happy new year!