Light.

I have been blindingly lucky this year to find myself in the company of people that know so much more about wine than I do. I am adding this today, adding to writings in the same way as amending negative or inaccurate thoughts, rewiring bad thought patterns, adding things that may be obvious, but helping me to fill in a little around the edges. I am saying thank you.

I am grateful, I am filled with grace, I am filled with graciousness and have been on the receiving end of so much this year. There has been sudden and unexpected generosities that have touched me deeply. They have helped me to fashion a framework to continue with, helped to form a braced scaffold that will serve in my life ahead, my art-life, my wine-life, my writing-life.

Without a doubt this has been the most difficult year of my life. It has been hard in a way that redefined the word, it has been difficult in a way that forced a reconciliation inside myself between shadow and light. It has been shocked recognition of underlying darknesses that blinded me in the way that a Caravaggio painting wavers exclusively between black and white, presence and absence, the divine reduced by symbolism (translated) to such intense interplay of light and dark (chiarascuro is always exclusively extreme).

I am lucky and grateful to have experienced such hardnesses this year, such extensions into the surreal, into the hyper-real, into the atmospheric, into the microscopic. If I were to list things as they happened it would seem an absurd and brooding chain: if I were to count each thing and call it a loss it would not be accurate: if I call them each how they felt I would say that I suffered the death of seven people, seven things, seven blows. Any one event on its own would have bewildered, been a fatal sting-- strung together as they were, successive, they became a sort of a fabric, atmospheric, they became the air that I breathed. In this way I was lucky. I had to adjust to the dark. I had to pass through it and now am on the other side. The world sparkles a little bit now, but it is grown out of an underlying mushroomy forest floor. My world is solid now, in a new way, but I am still shaky, still shade-like, still quiet.

In the way of birth, of rebirth, this year has been painful. This year has changed my life, this year has become my life, this year has changed my personality. In many situations it has made me feel like the gawky thirteen year old that I used to be, the awkward, hunched, quiet girl that I have not seen in years. Rebuilding, new-building, new-creation-- all of these are obvious, the ashes swept away leaves for a brilliant white clean slate. But wow.

Today, I am reading John Berger, I am eating scrambled eggs, I am listening to trucks and birds outside, I am watching the trees throw light patterns over my bed. I am thinking about gifts, about information, I am thinking about connections and people that I love. I am trying to find my way into that sweet spot in my own brain where these things live, the places in my heart where these people are. I am overwhelmed by words and sentences and onrush today. I am overwhelmed with the beauty of the things I have been given this year: the wines, the conversations, the eyes, the "falling sheaf of edges" Annie Dillard calls the edges of our own world, our consciousness-edge, W.C. Williams' cut, liminal leaf-edge.

I feel blessed, gold-blessed, finely spun, soft light on my shoulders. I remember the dream I had of my childhood house where I stood in the living room and light fell on my shoulders like a cloak, as it fell I heard the word 'mantle'-- the voice that said it spelled it out, and I understood something important in the dream that I wasn't able to bring back, something about the double meaning of the word 'mantle', something about the essential quality of light, especially the softness of childhood light, the slowed down particles of remembered afternoon light, the soft powder of teenage school day light through old Victorian windowpanes, thicker at the bottom than the top, slow molasses of slowest downward liquid (house as skin, window-eyes, Rilke and Bachelard).

I am thinking about a lot of things today, I am watching white light through open white walls, through old tin painted walls, through windows. I am listening to birds, and feeling overwhelmingly grateful to the people that have helped me along my way, especially in this of all years.