beyond the wall

This is a recent photo during our current sunny, frosty weather. It reminds me how photographs are so much better when you get good light…

I’ve our holiday decorations packed away since Monday. I try not to let them linger too much after the festivities are over, but I do miss the blinking lights. They’re cheery during our long nights. Although, I’ve already noticed the extra minutes on our evenings, which is a delightful amuse-bouche of longer days to come.

I’ve not made any resolutions for the New Year. In general I’m always working to a plan of improvement both personally and creatively, and I try (I don’t always succeed) to view each day as an opportunity to do something new or keep on track. Still, sometimes there is a great deal of power in marking change in some fashion. Like those pencil lines on the wall your parents made to chart your growth.

I was looking up useful quotes to use in the newsletter I edit for the Irish Playwrights and Screenwriters Guild, and I re-discovered this section of ‘Little Gidding’, from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (a poem I revisit regularly). It’s a fine reminder of the power of beginnings and ends and words.

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.