new year, new site

What I realized, at some point, maybe just before Thanksgiving or so, is that the old site, Cleaner Plate Club, is now no longer me. It’s something else entirely – a brand, of sorts, though I despise how everything eventually seems to be reduced to its “brand,” despise the word itself — “brand” — so crass, so coarse, so limiting and one-dimensional.

It’s okay. The Cleaner Plate Club, still, is part of me. It’s what led me down a certain path, one that allowed me to see beauty and ritual amid the rush of the everyday, to slow down enough to notice the gulf between the mass-produced, the ugly-yet-efficient, and all those things things that might never register on an economist’s table, but which have meaning and value simply because they are completely themselves.

These other things, of course — the handmade, the one-of-a-kind, the absurd and the well-worn and the well-loved — were once the only kinds of things. Here, though, one full decade into the twenty-first century, we sometimes need to be reminded that they exist at all.

So here, in this stopping point, is room for something else. For the tiny details that make me stop, even briefly, that shake me out of the stupor of laundry and car trips, dishes placed carefully in the dishwasher, recycling boxes stacked neatly with catalogs briefly glanced, then casually discarded.

Here: a word, a phrase, an image, something with history, something that reminds me, “you are here, now, in this moment. You, here, now.”

A tree in the forest, glimmering moon overhead: a crack, whoosh, a thud. Then nothing. Did you hear it? No matter: Here are my own two feet, sunk deep in the early winter’s snow. There, up there, is the ring that glows around the moon.

This is a moment in time, unlike any other. This, right here, is where I am.

Happy new year, world of mine.