I started a new year on Diwali. A late October new.

This closed out my hardest 12-month stretch yet, and if you’ve seen the stretches that came before this, in my frightfully wondrous life, you know how significant a statement that is.

You know how I must have reached right past the stick of my joints, the stay of my skin, the hold of my spirit.

I did all that reaching, but I did not snap. I did not snap. I pulled like dough, and wore myself thin in spots, but I did not snap.

This will be a year to gather myself close. To fold myself over and over again, until these stretches become nothing more than the story of how I grow twice as tall as an ordinary thing when put over a fire.

Folding myself back together is a great chore some days, and a great joy some days.

Today it was a great joy. I found time for some of my oldest loves, and my heart squeezed me close and pulled the dough of me back in towards my center.

It is steady work, old work. Loving is my oldest work. It is a life-long habit I got too stretched to keep up. I will get back into it.

This is a biscuit year.

I knead myself whole.

_______________________

“Write a prayer” prompt, via https://promptosaur.wordpress.com