Sooooo looking back at this first month of 2012, how did I do with my goals for the year? Let’s see. I only had three. That should be easy, right?

Walk daily: The good news is that I did walk more than I did last month. However, I didn’t walk every day. For example, yesterday I drove to work because I needed to go to the store before work to pick up something for lunch and with the store a mile in the opposite direction from where I work, it was easier to do that.

Read daily: With this one, I did much better, only missing one day to my knowledge and that only this week because I got caught up on games on Facebook after I returned home from work.

Pray/meditate daily: This is the one I didn’t do well at all, unless you want to call “Lord, help me get through this day without killing someone” as a prayer. I probably did say that every day (just kidding, more like every other day — well, only half-kidding on that last one). I need to make time to chill at the end of the day, even if it’s just putting on some music and the headphones to wash over the rest of the day.

Maybe I should listen to something like this each night (I don’t know about you, but I just chill reading the description of it):

Each Friday or Saturday as the case might be, I post Flashback Friday, where I use St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Examen as a guide and usually ask the following questions of myself and then you: For what are you least grateful this past week? For what are you most grateful this past week? So what are you least grateful for and most grateful for this past week?

So what’s next? Well, instead of trying to list all of my choices, I thought I’d just show you them all from my recently updated Goodreads to-be-read list (not in order of series — it was complicated enough for me to get them formatted this far– or in order in which I plan on reading):

So where am I going to start? I already have Nesbø’s next book, Nemesis, out from the library so I’ll probably start there. Of course, a friend just returned my copy of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close that he borrowed from my Nook, which he said he enjoyed, although he didn’t necessarily like the way it was done. So I am tempted by that one and Tina Fey’s Bossypants from Audible, which I downloaded this past weekend.

At this point, I don’t know, but I’ll let you know as soon as I decide. If you are familiar with any of these books, let me know which one or which series I should choose to start. If you aren’t familiar with any of these books, let me know what how your reading went for January and what you have planned for February and the rest of the year?

When I learned this past weekend from Serena that Lu, Kelly, and Eva had issued the following challenge: post about poetry once a month, on the last Tuesday of the month, for 2012, I knew I had to participate.  However, I didn’t know what I was going to write about poetry. So I’ve decided to keep my first entry simple with a poem of my own from several years ago that I did at a reading, simply (lazily) titled:

Poem

-- after reading Tao Te Ching
translated by Stephen Mitchell

Strain not for the word,
let it come
like OM.
As simple as breath.
As deadly as
the viper,
let it sink its
skin into your skin
until you become
the whisper of
being,
non-being
we all are
becoming,
a breath lost
in the whirlwhind
nothing more,
something less by
less this way
comes
glimpses
of the gone world
spit out on
the page.