Happy New Year 5771 (but who's counting?)

I feel so lucky! Twice a year I have a chance to start all over again, twice a year I can wish a "Happy New Year," twice a year I can reconnect with people I don't connect so often and twice a year I can create another vision.

This time it's the Jewish new year, which goes together more or less with the beginning of the school year, so it was always fitting with a new start. New books, new teacher, crispy new notebooks, sharp pencils, new friends, new classroom, and a of course, a new season - autumn.

Now, it has been a while since I last went to school, but I can still identify with the feelings - terror mixed with excitement.

I look back at what I wrote in my New year 2010 post and I find out I couldn't write much about the vision for the new year. Maybe because it was quite a dark winter and I couldn't see the light.

On the positive side, in the last jewish year 5770, I started my blog, and managed to write at list once a month (soon we celebrate a year). I started to learn Dutch (which was one of my results last "Rosh Hashana"), and by now I can speak a little (quite funnily) and understand quite a bit, so I no longer feel like a stupido whenever these sounds are spoken in my neighborhood (and as a result of my effort in Dutch I can also understand a bit of German, so it's two for the price of one). I must say (because I'm really excited about it), that I never thought I would be able to get a grip of that language (and that's after 10 years of living in Holland), and still I find it one of the most difficult languages in the world. I only did a little, but the results were so rewarding that I'm totally motivated to continue. So definitely I take this as a result for 5771.

Another great thing that had happened in 5770, and would like to take it with me to 5771, was that I took a Rebalancing Course with Satyarthi, and found it such an amazing tool to work on myself and others. It is a great way to meditate and to learn about the body. As a result I read "Bioenergetics" by Alexander Lowen (on my holidays!!!), and I'm looking forward to learn more about the body and it's holding patterns (especially mine).

All and all I'm pretty excited about the leaving year and the new year to come. A lot had happened on inner and outer levels.

At the moment of writing this, I'm in the Gargano in Italy. About 45 minutes ago I was just sitting in meditation and as I was doing so, I realized that the new year is actually descending right here at this very very moment.

It was raining today so there was not much of a beach, which gave me the opportunity to paint theses two paintings.