What an extraordinary year this has been. In the main it has been extraordinarily bad — the most painful year in my adult life. Most of what I have learned this year fills me with despair, broken intermittently by waves of revulsion. The strange thing is, what has happened changes my concept of my past, in particular my childhood, more than it does my future. The future trajectory of my life is, though, also changed forever by what has unfolded. I am reminded of Stanley Kunitz’s question, “How shall we be reconciled / to our feast of losses?”

More recently there has been a positive turn of events, an opportunity — balm in Gilead for me. It feels like a great blessing, one which promises me right livelihood, a chance to do my best work, and an adventure, too.

And here’s what so difficult: Almost all of this — good and bad — is stuff that I cannot write about here. At least not yet. So wouldn’t you think I could simply address less portentous matters, and let these taboo subjects sort themselves out? Apparently not. Hence the long silences.

So for now, as I try to gather myself yet again, I’d like to leave you with this little miracle of a poem by Jane Kenyon.

HAPPINESS

There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.