*a poem from Maya Angelou, because as I write this it’s Sunday, a day or rest and reflection (or, at least, I’ll try to rest and reflect). It is also the end of 2024, which has been a marvelous, tumultuous, hard, challenging, disappointing, amazing, and wonderful year. It is officially winter, and slowly, slowly, the world around me (including my social life) has quieted down, thank goodness – and – nobody, nobody can make it out here alone. Grateful now and always for my friends, and those in my family with whom I share authentic bonds of love and mutual respect – neither of which are guaranteed.
This is also being posted one day after the death of former President Jimmy Carter, for whom I cast my first ever, and first losing, presidential vote in 1980. May he rest In peace; his memory is certainly a blessing, after a long life well-lived and – married 77 years – not alone, although his wife died in 2023, and who knows how that loss felt to one so inured to her loving, close companionship. Blessed are the peace makers, and peanut farmers. Is it even possible in these ambitious, studied, and inauthentic days, to be or find a politician like Jimmy Carter? I hope so.
I’m working on my win/loss lists for 2024, which I will complete tomorrow, and then I’ll read the list through one last time, after which it’ll be burned, let go of, all the better to begin again…remembering that some losses are wins in disguise…
Lying, thinking
Last night
How to find my soul a home
Where water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone
And I don’t believe I’m wrong
That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
There are some millionaires
With money they can’t use
Their wives run round like banshees
Their children sing the blues
They’ve got expensive doctors
To cure their hearts of stone.
But nobody
No, nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Now if you listen closely
I’ll tell you what I know
Storm clouds are gathering
The wind is gonna blow
The race of man is suffering
And I can hear the moan,
’Cause nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
