Inside Out

Are you Calvin? or does his attitude make you pull a face like Hobbs?

via Alex Papin

With a run of festivals coming up, first the Winter Solstice, then Christmas, then the arrival of the New Year, we at Totem are going into hibernation for a couple of weeks before emerging in January to set you more challenges, help you have more adventures and most importantly, to help you learn from them.

Every year we look for a piece of advice or prose that sums up the festive period for us and every year we come back to the same one. This piece could probably be read every day with becoming old so once a year won’t hurt. It’s from master storyteller Neil Gaiman and if it needs a title, “Benediction” would probably suffice.

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

Have fun in the snow and we’ll see you all in the New Year.

A striking and touching New Year’s Eve message delivered by author Neil Gaiman at Symphony Hall in Boston.

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.
…I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you’ll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you’ll make something that didn’t exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind.

via Makezine, picture from guilty’s flickrstream under Creative Commons