The end of 2023

I wanted to decorate our little Christmas tree with lots of doves this year, and was disappointed and a little surprised to find only three in the box of long-treasured decorations. This is the prettiest, with its richly coloured and grained wood and little beads, and was a gift from a good friend which makes it doubly special. My attempts to photograph it on the tree, which stands in a dark corner, have not been fruitful - as always, I try to hand hold in available light rather than taking the time to fetch a tripod - so today I placed it in the light from the window. (Unfortunately, as usual, I didn't do any ironing first.) It's not the day's best photo, and my belief that I had one last extra for today's muted but always beautiful view of the valley from my back door turns out to be incorrect, but I think this is how I want to end this year of increasing conflict, polarisation and despair, with its terrible news each day from war zones and from the places where climate change is now bringing devastation. Hope is hard to hold onto, and so much needed; peace so hard to believe in. I've again been thinking back to Rebecca Solnit's writing on hope: this is from her 2017 Guardian article, which coincided with a new edition of her earlier Hope in the Dark: 


"I began talking about hope in 2003, in the bleak days after the war in Iraq was launched. Fourteen years later, I use the term hope because it navigates a way forward between the false certainties of optimism and of pessimism, and the complacency or passivity that goes with both. Optimism assumes that all will go well without our effort; pessimism assumes it’s all irredeemable; both let us stay home and do nothing. Hope for me has meant a sense that the future is unpredictable, and that we don’t actually know what will happen, but know we may be able write it ourselves.
Hope is a belief that what we do might matter...
...
To be hopeful, we need not only to embrace uncertainty but to be willing to know that the consequences may be immeasurable, may still be unfolding ... Think of hope as a banner woven from those gossamer threads, from a sense of the interconnectedness of all things, of the lasting effect of the best actions, not only the worst. Of an indivisible world in which everything matters."



I may have quoted this before here, and if I did, it was probably in my habitual year end morosity. In the 1980s I had the time and freedom to engage in activism, to try in small ways to work towards a world based on the values I believed in. These days, I stay at home. I care for J, my beautiful, creative and severely disabled adult daughter, and orchestrate the support available to her and her interaction with the services she needs. I try to chip away in small ways at the need for better provision, more inclusive facilities. In between, and the moments in between are limited, I try, with P, to live reasonably sustainably and, like Candide, to cultivate our garden and eat and preserve as much as we can from it. It's not going to change the bigger picture, and I feel powerless in the face of the horror unfolding in Gaza and Ukraine, but I try to hold onto the hope that what we do, how we choose to live and to relate to others, and the small actions I can take, matter.

I wish you all well. I hope, without much expectation, that 2024 may bring relief from the worst horrors, mitigation of the worst crises affecting our planet. I hope we can all continue to see beauty, interest and joy around us every day.

I haven't done very well with Blip recently. Today is the end of my third year, but the days on which I've not uploaded a photo mean that my "blipversary" will be at least a week late. The habit of daily photography is now well ingrained, but too often I don't download, don't have time to process, select and share, and don't manage to look at what others have shared. I need to learn to keep it simple, to make quick choices, write briefly. However, I continue to value the discipline of this daily record of my days, to appreciate the glimpses into other lives and worlds and the many beautiful and interesting images others share, and to enjoy the interaction with others' situations and preoccupations. This daily commitment to find something interesting or beautiful to frame and record helps me through the constraints and anxieties I live with, and I'm grateful for it.