Sometimes I don’t feel meditative, contemplative, or even grounded. I like the phrase “settle the self on the self” but I can’t always do it. It’s like sweeping the floor. I’m fond of the activity, but sometimes I’d rather just lie around.
“I did it once,” said my darling friend poet Elizabeth Lamb about dusting the top of her refrigerator. She preferred writing haiku to housework.
I decided to calculate how often I’ve dusted the top of the hot water heater. Twice a month. 33 years. It comes out to approximately 792 times. Frankly, it feels like more.
I don’t have much relationship to the secular new year, but Elizabeth was very fond of it–in actually and as a haiku topic. She wrote:

Orion ablaze
above the old adobe
New Year’s Eve
ESL

After her death, I wrote one of my own:

your moonstones
wrapped away
like a forgotten dream