hello!

Hello friends!

Sorry I’ve been MIA this month. Life threw me a couple of curve balls, but all is well and I’m back to work this week. I am working on the newsletter and will get that out in the next few days! There is a book giveaway too, but it will have to be a quick one to get it in before March, so watch for that. :)

Thanks for your kind thoughts and checking in. I hope February has been kind to you all. I look forward to catching up with everyone.

much love.

tonia

Brigid's Day

A photo from earlier in the week.

The rain has swollen our community creek, so we couldn’t go down to dip our hands in it as we’d planned on this Brigid’s Day, but we prayed a blessing over it anyway. It’s home for fish and frogs, crayfish, the giant salamander that surprised our son one day, countless insects and creatures and birds, stones and root and branches, silt of our common land, and most importantly, water, which grows more precious to me every year. (Do we ever dare complain about rain and snow in these days when so many in the world have no water at all?)

“Let us bless the humility of water

Always willing to take the shape

Of whatever otherness holds it…

Water: voice of grief,

Cry of love,

In the flowing tear.

Water: vehicle and idiom

Of all the inner voyaging

That keeps us alive.

Blessed be water,

Our first mother.”

~ John O’Donohue

***

This week, I also found a lovely series of house blessings in my Northumbria Community Prayer Book to be said on Brigid’s Day. You stop at each room of the house and give a blessing specific to that space. We’ll do that tonight.

Here are a couple of them:

At the Doorway:

May God give His blessing to the house that is here.

God bless this house from roof to floor,

from wall to wall,

from end to end,

from its foundation and in its covering.

We call upon the Sacred Three

to save, shield and surround

this house, this home,

this day, this night,

and every night.

In the kitchen:

Seeing a stranger approach,

I would put food in the eating place,

drink in the drinking place,

music in the listening place,

and look with joy for the blessing of God,

who often comes to my home

in the blessing of a stranger.

May your homes and your places be blessed as well, friends, with generosity, compassion, abundance, and life this weekend.

Peace keep you,

tonia

tether

Last year I decided to try keeping a log of my days.  Most nights, before I go to sleep, I pull a notebook out of my nightstand and make a list of bullet points about what I did:  Gym.  Ideas for short story.  Novel brainstorming.  Draft for newsletter.  Drove to Portland to pick up xyz.  Backgammon with Mark.  Read.  Etc.  It’s boring reading, but it’s an attempt to unlock what’s hidden in my mind.  Often, I find that writing down went for a walk, reminds me that while I was walking I was thinking about one of my kids, or listening to an important podcast, or contemplating the best use of our property in a climate-altered future.   So the bullet points sometimes take on a life of their own and morph into little essays or lines of poetry or plot ideas for stories. 

This is actually the hardest part of writing for me, I think, continually mining my own life, not letting thoughts sink to the warm dark compost of the subconscious, but pulling them out into the light and pinning them to a page like tiny black beetles, or powder-dusted moths.  (Of course, even these skewered specimens are part of the continual composting in the mind.) The writer’s job is to be attentive to what we would normally ignore, to give shape and form to the humus of ideas lying quiet and fertile within us.  

Not everything that gets pinned to the page is worth bringing to life though.  Journaling (even in the form of logging) helps uncover my worn-out themes and tired tropes.  I can see on my pages the fixation on some experiences and the underemphasis of others equally, if not more, important.  I can see the pattern of biases, the pockets of anger that indicate I’m not in a state of forgiveness yet.  I can see the doubts that rise and fall with my hormones, and the need to build more mental stamina. I can see my fears pounding for attention.

I think often about the subjectiveness of our lives.  Unless we are in the regular presence of small children or the sick or very elderly, much of contemporary life is a helium balloon, untethered from the tangible and the earthy.  Food arrives on shelves in packages, money exists in pixelated bank statements, trash gets toted off in trucks to unseen locations, beauty is nothing more than photogenics.  Anchoring, like decluttering, is a survival skill for the modern age.  I’m a word person, so journaling is one of my tethers.  My husband is not; I don’t imagine he would find a daily bullet list enlightening at all.  He’s more likely to discover his thoughts on a run or mowing the lawn, which he does.  The point is, we need to tie the balloon to something or it’s lost. 

But more than that is the need to know we exist in this world for a purpose.  “That we are here is a huge affirmation,” John O’Donohue says.  “Somehow life needed us and wanted us.”  Being attentive to the whispered messages of common life may be the writer’s job, but attentiveness to the messages of our individual lives is everyone’s job.  The disconnectedness that pervades our age leads to anger, fear, anxiety, and a sense of un-reality.  If we are here, it is not to be plagued by the spirit of the age, but because we have something to offer, something to combat it, to bring us together, connect us and nurture life. 

So, consider this post, rambling and mundane as it is, a whisper in the dark, an encouragement to dig and discover, a wave to bring you into harbor and an anchor to help you stay.  Find your way, then find your way.  We need you here.

If you want to share, tell me about your journaling habits, or the other ways you tether and discover yourself in the comments!

Virgil Wander - winner!

Congratulations to Andrea Chavez!

Send me a message with your mailing address and I’ll get it to you as soon as I can!

Thanks to everyone who entered. <3 There will be another giveaway in the February newsletter!

xo

tonia

January book giveaway

The newsletter should arrive in your inboxes on Thursday, and with it comes the return of the monthly book giveaway for U.S. subscribers. This month I’m giving away Leif Enger’s newest book, Virgil Wander, which is a warm, funny, life-nurturing story about a man who loses his memory and much of his language in an accident, and what happens when he starts to put it all back together. It’s one of my favorite books I read last year and I think it’s a lovely way to start off a new year.

All the details and how to enter in the January newsletter!

If you aren’t a subscriber yet, sign up here!