Dear Everyone,

I've struggled to figure out what to tell you this year. And I think the main reason is that I don't want to tell you anything.

There's a temptation to put a tidy little bow on the year. To write something charming or witty or Hallmark. There's nothing wrong with those things, but I don't want to be in that business. Not with you.

We've been through some things, yes? We've been through hirings and firings and babies and graves. There have been trick elbows and coffee stains and pontifications around a fire. Sunrises over the pines and long nights making faces out of the bumps on the ceiling. That isn't a tidy package. It's a beautiful, glorious, sometimes heartbreaking mess. As it should be. As are we all.

That heap of contradictions is reality, and reality is what lies beyond the reach of our concepts. It's what persists in the face of belief or a lack thereof. And it, this reality, this life, does not exist to be understood. It exists to be lived.

2019 gave our family and our world countless examples of that truth. Beauty in tragedy, oneness in disconnection, impermanence while nearly nothing seems to change. You can't put that under a microscope, though lord knows I have tried. I have to remind myself that my job is to sing to it. To sing to those to whom it has brought joy, and especially to those it has broken and burned.

The more I experience this life, the less I know about it, except maybe for one growing certainty: it is dead set on mocking my understanding. It doesn't want me to take the water's temperature. It doesn't even want me to dive in and swim. It wants me to know that I am already one of its waves. When I really know that, then I will be free to dance along its surface, to allow myself to get mixed up in its waters.

So I'll leave you with an offering along those lines, one that I wrote last fall while sitting on an actual beach, watching my children toiling joyfully to stand amid the tide.

To you I give the ocean
To you I give the waves
And how their churning stills my mind
And my boy.

To you I give my daughter's fear of it
And its overcoming.
To you I give her leaping, yelling
"I am God, parting the sea."

You can also have my son's retort
"Actually,
that was Moses."
Enjoy.

My offering, pleasing to you:
The beer drinkers at Bruno's,
The sand on the floor,
The panicked slantwise retreat of the crabs.

Also that second line in the Quarter
I know it was a rich white people second line, but still),
The sweat wrung down my back,
My three showers in a day.

My friends afar are yours, as is their meeting
The footsqueak of the beach
The worrying of jellyfish
And Jupiter, insisting over the sea.

I offer to you
My absurd toenail polish
The despair of seven months of tinnitus
That tick bite from camping.

I make a burnt offering of my fear
And my frailty
My impatience, my need
And evenings in a hammock.

To you I give my names
To you I give my faces and my hands
To you I give the story I call me
That I still pretend is real.

Please take it all.
Leave me empty
Leave me open
And leave the light on when you go.

Love to you all. Love to us all.

Happy holidays, everyone.