So it is this sentiment that prepared me to be struck by a passage from Alain de Botton’s book, The Architecture of Happiness. He writes, “We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our building to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves” (2006, p. 107).

From Dripp, I would dream of going to places. These would usually be a train ride away to LA or maybe San Juan Capistrano or San Clemente, somewhere where I would pretend to know how to speak Spanish or feel like I was searching for something new. I wanted to invite the feeling of travel in my own backyard. It would give me a rush of energy, visiting something different from myself yet in my own home all the same. It is a different thing to have these victories and than to have it in a vision, and at this time, I only had these images, these desires.

Here is what you can expect with my letters now. As mentioned before the small Winter Break series, I will be writing less frequently so I can continue to write with sustained quality and take on more learning for this next step. I promise to write to you once per month, the first Tuesday, in 2024. I am proud of the writing I shared with you last year, and I want to do that again while I expand myself in other directions, namely by progressing in my MS in Organizational Leadership. I am also a step closer to launching a paid subscription here in my goal toward building a sustainable writing life.

This letter series, A Serious Thing, takes its name from the words of a favorite poet, Mary Oliver, and is now a year older. In the spirit of that poem, I want you to know this poem next: “Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain to Me” by Jane Hirshfield. You can listen to it here. You can read it here.

I explored some of his work in relation to another writer, Mahmoud Darwish, but a line from Octavio Paz is with me right now as I reflect and reset. It’s his poem, “Native Stone,” that holds one of the longest-lasting questions I have known. I understand and do not know the final line. It is powerful and beyond me.