ONE SOFT WINTRY MORNING, my grandmother looked at me with a calm and knowing fire in her eyes. She told me that a new year was approaching, and this meant “we had better get on with ‘even better’ times than the year before.”
Looking up from the green of her overgrown garden, I asked if we should write some resolutions.

Gliding along the rays of a December sun that spilled effortlessly over her eyes, with the look of years long past and the heart strums of a young girl, she replied, “Resolutions are meant for those who have resolved not to adventure into the light.”

So here I am, leaning back into the worn fabric of her favorite chair, gleaming upon her memories of 100 years, when she only looked forward and never back.

And though she and her scented lavender hair and soft lilting voice are no longer with us in the physical sense, her presence is everlasting, especially as the year comes to a close and another unsung year awaits us.

In her spirit, I have written these words just for you and for me.

I can still feel the energy of her childhood, when she traveled west through the Dust Bowl to engage a better life, all so that I could be born one day and write this very passage you are reading now, all spent and flushed with the youth of remembrance.

Right about now, she might say . . .

“Forgive yourself for this year, for all of your transgressions and seeming failures. Because you are alive, they are all miracles for you.

“Part of you is better for it, and ‘all of you’ is lovelier still, even for what you ‘thought’ you failed . . . even for those you felt you assailed . . .

“These experiences have made you more whole, not less, as you wonder endlessly about who you are.

“Because who you are is miraculous, especially the adventuresome wanderer who gets caught in the fray, feeling lost and forsaken and alone.

“You are still here, another year older, another moment more beautiful and aged, yet more youthful than ever before.

“This year you also sailed brilliantly along the curves — don’t you recall?

“You sang songs you did not even know upon life’s wandering voyage, and the intricate memories of a life well traveled. You were brilliant not only once or twice, but many times.

“Do not mourn your losses. Be still instead, in this wintry glow that will subside, if only for a moment now.

“No resolutions should suffice for a life bursting with more life, for a world of bewilderment and moments left unsaid and more cherished; your time is all worth knowing. For all of the years forward, live them wildly.

“Know that the next year will surpass all others, because it is new, and because it will be filled with moments that remain unspoken of harsh and light, right along with your steady heart.”

The month before she passed away, my grandmother began to greet me at each visit at her windswept door with photos, newspaper clippings and stories she had handwritten about our family’s enchanted and stormy history.

In her hands she clutched yellowed anthologies, diary entries and stories about her own parents, who fought the weary struggle so that we could all live a brighter day and sleep through hundreds of new years without peril or strife.

I am looking at the pile of papers right now, as my grandmother sits nearby in memory and hope, with a gleam of gentleness in her pose, and I am grateful to her for all of the wisdom, the forbearance and idealism she inspired in me, in my children and for generations to come.

Give yourself a gift this year . . . live the life of wonder.

Stare into the sky as you wish for nothing but everything imaginable and everything you could not possibly imagine or see.

Forgive your wishes and proclamations of this past year. May you want only to bask in the glow of “not knowing” . . .

In the sheer madness of all that is “impossible and possible,” be willing to close your eyes in abandonment and joy, if only for a sunrise or sunset of innocence and breadth.

May you have all the adventures that life has to offer you in the coming year.

Francesca Biller is an award-winning investigative journalist, author and Edward R. Murrow recipient. She is writing two books to be published in 2015 for Zorba Press, a novel and a collection of short stories and poetry. She happily resides in Benicia with her two daughters, Rose and Jade.