It seems to be that New Year’s has become the Lost Holiday. So naturally, I want to write about it all week. Much of Christmas and now Thanksgiving has been subsumed by super-hyped shopping frenzies. The marketers haven’t quite figured out how to turn New Year’s into a mega-shopping experience yet, and I can’t image anyone has any money left after Black Friday and Christmas. I don’t.

In America, drinking and smoking are considered insane or criminal behavior, and rowdy times usually involve at least one lawsuit.  Liquor and partying are frowned upon, but also the jubilation surrounding the day always seems forced.  I enjoyed watching the ball drop in Times Square when I was a kid. I thought it was a big deal. I’m not sure what it means now and I can’t imagine staying up to watch it.

Yet curiously, New Year’s has become very important to me, one of the most spiritual of the holidays. It offers me the opportunity to think about who I want to be in the coming hear, and what it means to be me in 2012. As I get older, I do realize how quickly times moves past, and how important it is to make good use of it, to make a stand for my life. When else are we challenged to consider our lives and goals for a year? What ritual could be more important?

In 2012, I want to live a simpler, less expensive and wasteful life.

I want to be more creative, and experiment more with new forms of media and story-telling.

I want to be more peaceful, and to continue to work to not live in fear.

I wish to explore my own individual and personal notions of health care and move still farther away from conventional ideas about health – tests, proceedures, pills.

I want to be a good lover and friend to my wife. To think of her every day and remember the small things in life. To consider what love means and to bring more of it into my life.

I want to listen more to the animals here, the dogs, the donkeys, even the chickens. To learn more, to shed the arrogance and emotionalizing that marks so many human perspectives about animals.

I want to celebrate my first-ever short story collection,”Dancing Dogs” out in October from Random House.

I want to make my own news. The “Blogs I Love” page on this spanking new website is my first venture there. In 2012 I hope to see a new kind of media flowing from this site. One for you and me. Our agenda. Life, not business, war and hate.

That’s my first list. I’d like to deepen it this week.