prosperity

HAPPY FOR NO/MANY REASONS

January 1, 2019  10:02 am

Happy New Year! It’s a new day, a new year and a new challenge. I’m committing to the Ultimate Blog Challenge  of writing a post every day for the month of January. I’m not one for making New Year Resolutions but it’s not such a bad idea. Even if you fall off the Resolution wagon every year, you’ve made the effort to come back again and again. You have hope for a longer ride each year before falling off. It’s better than having no hope and no resolutions. What then?

My resolutions are the challenges of creating through words, art and photography that I find online. I’ve completed most of them except the 365somethings2018. I fell off its wagon maybe halfway. 2018 was a hard year, a long year. It felt good to surrender and say ‘uncle’. It was bigger than me. I had to ‘give up’, rest and gather up my strength again before climbing back on the wagon. My wheels were mired in immovable muck.

But here I am, sitting here, tapping, sipping my tea. I’m dressed in my ‘good clothes’, red sweater for prosperity. It’s not Chinese New Year, but it is a new year. I hope to tap up an abundance of Gong Hee Fat Choys (wishes for prosperity). Maybe they will come to be on February 5th, Chinese New Year. Wouldn’t that be cool?

It is cool on this western New Year’s morning. I’m warm and content, happy for no reason and for many reasons. When all my basic needs, food, shelter and clothing are met, the rest is like they say, is gravy. I have lots of gravy. I am retired with a good pension. No more early morning risings. No more night shifts. I have my health, family and a few good friends. I can count them on one hand. The Universe gives me enough. I am not able to handle much more than that. Sheba is the gift from my angels above. I get to celebrate the new year two times every year. I get second chances to get it right. I shall not make too many demands. I have enough.

THE SPIRIT OF CELEBRATIONS

IMG_1364I’m thinking of past Christmases and New Years as I awake in the dark this morning.  I’m thinking that it would be much easier if it was in July.  There would be no snow, heavy coats, scarves and boots, coughs or runny noses to deal with.  Life would be lighter and easier…would it not?

I’m also thinking back to my childhood in China, of New Year’s Eve.  Seems to me that is the only memory I have of a true celebration ….. a welcoming in of the new year and paying homage to the one past.  That is my interpretation of the rituals,  for I was but a child when I left my homeland.  That is how I like to remember it.

I’m feeling my loss, as a child of immigrants to this country….the  loss of my Chinese-ness, my culture, my heritage.  But I have spent many more years here than there and I can never go home again.  I am a stranger in both lands.   Sometimes it is necessary to feel our pain and losses in order to move ahead.  I have felt that pain many times.  But I also have gained much because of that sense of loss.

I really do not want to dwell on pain and losses.  They are not always real, but things our mind grab onto, maybe because of something someone said or done.  Who knows what is in another’s mind or heart.  And you cannot understand it so you write your own interpretation.  You allow yourself to doubt and you let poison in.  You hurt.  How does that help?  Better that we celebrate, however we can, to let in the light.

I like the Chinese ways of ushering in the new by cleaning and clearing out stale and stagnant chi.  Gung Hee Fat Choy! Happy New Year! Chinese tradition is to bring the new year in with clean house, new clothes and to receive/give red envelopes of money ..symbol of prosperity. My childhood memory is of our house being warmed by the fires tended by the women in our family as they made sweets and dim sims in the night.  Perhaps one day I will learn how to make some of them.

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I’m sweeping out the debris of my mind, letting go of past grievances and hurts, opening my heart to receive all the goodness that there is in the universe.  I am baking bread, , making soup, blessing our home.  I am wearing the colour red, the colour of good fortune.

I am no longer a lost child. looking for my identity.  I have found my Chinese self, Hafong, alias Lily, the born again Catholic,  who admires the ways of Buddha .  I am a Chinese woman living in Canada, a country in the Universe.  And I am celebrating my life.