Great Expectations--2010

When I was a very little girl with pokey pigtails and crooked bangs snagging my eyelashes, I could never have BELIEVED-IMAGINED-CONJURED the possibility of a YEAR with such BIG numbers as 2010! It was beyond the scope of my imagination!! But here it is, all wrapped in a pretty red box of high expectations.

Four of us toasted the magical midnight hour from our perch overlooking the Chesapeake Bay.  Black spindly fingers of denuded trees stood as a filter between us and the brilliantly exploding fireworks over the frigid water. May we toast a New Beginning, a New Decade? It makes one feel optimistic! It gives one a sense of adventure.

Isn't it great to start a fresh new calendar, no eraser marks, cross-outs, and illegible words? Equally exciting is to choose a new WORD to focus on for the year.  One might call it a 'personal-one-word-mantra'. This year my word is:

                                                         EXPLORE

To EXPLORE brings visions of Raiders of the Lost Ark; intrepid 19th century female archeologists shaking dust and spiders from their bodices; traversing the depths of the Indian Ocean to the brilliance of the North Star; challenges beyond what one might want to risk life and limb for.

This year will be my opportunity to learn, inquire, examine, and travel both the inner and outer life.  External-Internal-Exploring. Would you like to join me? 

My blog has a new "up-do" and name, I Paint. It is being re-purposed, to EXPLORE new and different avenues to make it interesting for you dear reader, and challenging for me; a bit of this, a bit of that; a dangling from the limb; smidgens of inner thinking, prose, poetry and lots of art and some how-to techniques. 

2010 will be a better year for all of us, if we EXPLORE its nooks and crannies together. Join me with open eyes and hearts to EXPLORE life, living and humankind.