Blogiversary!

I once told myself that I would get a tattoo if I could choose a design and remain as in love with it after one year as when I first selected it. I had a vague idea of something combining Sanskrit and Celtic knot work, and I even had the tattoo guy picked out- a friend of mine with a remarkably steady hand, and whose art I would have been honored to showcase on my body. I almost made it, but even after I thought I had a design that represented who I was, I couldn’t figure out where it should go. After a while, a funny thing happened; I started to change, and my design ideas changed along with me. I never made it past the one-year mark, that magical length of time that seemed to symbolize permanence to me. And so my skin is still naked, marked only by years.

I still acknowledge milestones. Five years with P.K. Two years in the house. One year left of school. As I garden more, I find myself aligning my behaviors and my diet with the seasons, tapping in to the annual cycles around us. However, permanence means something different to me now. It’s not so much an unchanging expression, like a tattoo, but the idea that I now identify with beliefs that have room to grow along with me. A year is a measure of a different kind-not a static milepost, but something much more malleable. Winter returns each year, but every winter is changed from the one before.

And so I met one of my hopes for this blog—I managed to maintain (mostly) regular posting for a whole year. Hooray! And instead of slowing down and losing interest, I’ve begun to get excited about new ways to keep things going over here at aestheticflow. It's becoming something that grows with me, instead of a static conversation. I started blogging as a way to talk out loud to myself about my attempts to become a more creative, mindful person, and to start putting those thoughts out into the universe. But now the universe is starting to talk back, and I’m hoping to expand the conversation and see where it takes me…

In fairy tales the time of testing is always a year and a day. Today is that extra day, the 366th, in which the test is won, and the heroine revels in success, at least for the moment. Tomorrow I’m planning to post some creative goals for the next year; today, I’m just living it.