Jodi Hills

So this is who I am – a writer that paints, a painter that writes…

Tag Archives: New Year


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It starts with one.

Even though I paint them frequently, in tiny sketchbooks, with fine brushes, I’m still surprised at how small they are when I see them en route. The winged details, often too small for the tiniest hairs of my most intricate brush, flutter in the trees. Not disturbing a leaf, yet still able to lift my heart.

And then I’m not small anymore. I’m no longer, “but what can I do?” “There’s only me?” I see the heavy lifting of this tiny bird, this “one,” and I am reminded that that’s all it takes. One. One small detail. One effort. To make maybe not this world better, or even this day, but certainly this one moment in time, yes, better, right here, in the flutter.

So on this first day. This number one. This tiny number that we tried to issue in with a bang of promises. We welcomed perhaps with rockets red glare of dazzling hope. How do we sustain the magic? I step out and have to believe, that I am, we are, not small anymore. And maybe, just maybe, it all continues, with a flutter.

Happy New Year!

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Heart-flakes.

It’s not that I don’t make resolutions, it’s just that mine are more of the day to day kind. Perhaps even moment by moment. I don’t know why I thought of it this morning. Maybe it was the crowd of Valentine’s Day hearts hanging in the hotel breakfast room that shouted January is almost over!

It goes so quickly. And I don’t want to waste any of it. So I looked it up this morning. This “resolution.” I had to scroll down a little, but I found my answer. By definition, in scientific terms, resolution means the smallest interval measurable. I smiled, because I guess that’s how my heart runs, my brain operates, in these smallest of intervals.

If the coffee is good and strong, and the hotel has peanut butter for my toast, breakfast is good. When the words come for my blog. When you respond. I feel connected. I fill my sketchbook slowly, page by page. The story, my life, unfolds.

I remember making those paper hearts in school. Folding the paper in half. Cutting out the heart shape. Then, still folded, making all the tiny cuts. Even then I remember thinking we had just done the same thing for snowflakes. In a blink the teacher took them from the wall, we changed the paper and made the same little cuts into heart-flakes. We didn’t think about the whole school year. We just made the tiny adjustments. The tiny cuts. And moved through each day.

I guess I’m still doing that. Making the tiny cuts and unfolding the day. Determined, resolute even, to measure the moments heart by heart.

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Let’s ride!

It was around 4am that I rolled over, secure in the knowledge that I would remember the opening line for today’s blog. Did it come in a dream? Or just a dozy thought… It seemed beautiful though, this line, this moment.

I used to be so certain of so many things. That summers would last forever. And the friendships made within. School day friends seemed easier. We were thrown together daily. Delivered five days a week by bus. Guarded through the crossings. Marched into classrooms. Plopped side by side. Row by row. Friend by friend. But summer, you had to make an effort. To see your summer friends, you had to get on bikes, run through fields, skip, sweat and swim. You had to make telephone calls from kitchen mounted phones, and wait through busy signals and unanswered rings. Sone of us even wrote letters, making promises of BFFs, signing with hearts in our names, never thinking that the new school year would separate us by room and teacher.

As quickly as the summers went, the years seem to go by even faster. People and summers pass, like moments in the dawn. But still I smile, because I believe in the forever of it all — that summers don’t really die — they live on in a place that we can only reach in dozy, passing thoughts… Where my mother still plays like a little girl.

Wide-eyed awake, I see 2024 pulling up like a big orange bus, flinging open its door and welcoming us to the new year. Chubby-legged and ever hopeful, I pull myself aboard! Let’s ride!

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In a flash

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I took a photograph as ’21 turned into ’22. I shook the image into view. Winter turned to spring before my eyes, and petals fell from trees. Pinks turned into greens. Splashes in sun-warmed water sounded like promises. I put sleeves on tanned shoulders, and never dreamed goodbyes would have to be said to love that fell from the tree that gave life. Bundled and braced. Memories wintered my soul in the white of the photograph — the photograph made not with a click of shutter, but the blink of an eye. The same blink that opened ’23. 

Open lens. Open heart. Smile! I’m just getting started.

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