dawning new year :: January 14, 2024

            I barely noticed crossing the 2023 finish line and entering the new year. The year of the owl was a tough one; it lasted twice as long as it should and death circled on all sides. I hardly had energy to notice that we are supposed to be starting again. I’ve thought it before, but I feel it more intensely now: January, coming in the heart of winter, deep on the heels of all that enforced merry-making, is a terrible, terrible time to have to find the motivation for new routines and habits. I want January to be a month to rest and reflect, to curl up with old journals and pots of tea. I want long, unembarrassed naps, already-watched movies, and thick books about naturalists or explorers enduring harsh conditions outside while I warm my toes under layers of blankets. There’s nothing stopping me from doing this, of course. I can begin a new year of habits on February 1st,  or March 23rd. It makes no difference.

            For now, I can feel the pull of winter on my animal body, drawing me into quieter spaces. This feels like wisdom I should attend; the earth and I are made of the same stardust, after all, but she is much, much older than me and has passed beyond the need to prove herself or produce for show. I find myself wanting to lean into her side and burrow into her skirts, let her decide when we start moving again.

            I don’t mean that I want to stop living though. When I was younger, I thought rest was just the absence of tasks. I thought it involved reclining my body and letting the laundry sit in the dryer and eating take-out or something. In this way, I managed to avoid all sorts of growth and personal development. I could keep myself spinning during working hours with a list of busy tasks and then be too tired to do anything meaningful with my remaining time (like my own art or creative work). And then, because I misunderstood the meaning of rest, I would refuse to create or journal or spend time alone with a notebook in the evenings or on the weekends because I had categorized that as “work” and I knew it was healthy to “rest.” To be fair, rest meant something different to me in the years I was raising and homeschooling four children than it does to me now. There are seasons. But there are also thousands of ways to procrastinate, aren’t there? 

            This winter season I am turning toward myself, going deep into places I have been avoiding. Some of this is the gift left by the owl, some of it is the lines on my face and the silver in my hair, the growing awareness that time does not stretch on indefinitely. If I would become someone, I must become that someone here, in this now. 

            So I set my alarm twenty minutes earlier, spend the time on writing morning pages, discovering that the pen has access to places in me that I have never uncovered. I do this out of desire, not demand. It doesn’t feel like habit or discipline I am building so much as a self I am quietly discovering, the emerging awareness I sometimes have in dreams or in the blurred spaces between waking and sleeping.

            And then because rest is regenerative, the morning pages extend to more words. I feel like seeing where a story might go. I feel like writing a letter, meandering around the soft corners of this winter hour. I feel like finishing, and so I do. Afterward I am more steady in myself than I was before. There is nothing strenuous about these meetings with myself, no intent to produce. And yet the words pile up, the creative spirit stirs.

            In a recent newsletter, L.M. Sacasas wrote about how slowly the sun arrives each day. Dawn is a gradual affair if you are attentive to it. I saw this recently when we were at the beach and I went out early to watch the ocean at sunrise which, according to my weather app, was supposed to arrive precisely at 7:42 am. I walked down about 20 minutes before that, when the sun was beginning to pink the clouds behind me, and headed home an hour later when the eastern sun was up enough to glint off a slant of western water. Maybe we can let the new year dawn on us like that too. Accept that January 1st is just the first pink signal that a new day is arriving instead of the starting gun for a race where we run fast now or fall behind. Maybe after the slow dawn of the new year, we’ll be better able to see what shape it wants to take, how we might live well in the light of it.

            How about you? Are you starting the year running? Or are you feeling the need for more time? Either way, I am holding out for a happy and deeply nourishing year for all of us.

Thinking of you all here, this quiet and encouraging community, with gratitude. Let’s share more words together this year if we can.

tonia

---

 This and that.

 *Reading: Claire Keegan’s novella Foster. Just exquisitely good storytelling. (Next I’ll watch the movie adaptation: The Quiet Girl.)

*Reading: the story of David Douglas, the Scottish botanist who collected and catalogued many of the indigenous NW plants for the British.

 *Reading: Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, about what we are supposed to do with problematic artists.

 *Making: this little blanket

*Making: an art journal with Suzi Banks Baum’s Dark Advent Workshop, learning to be imperfect and work with visual media. So hard for this perfectionist and yet so rewarding.

*Watching:  Ondine, Chinatown, and a selection of movies for a class I’m taking on Conspiracy Theories.

*Watching (soon): the new season of True Detective with Jodie Foster

 *Thinking about: Elizabeth Gilbert shaving her head and saying fuck it to beauty culture.  This whole interview is marvelous.

*Thinking about: Eliza Rathje’s gentle volumes of The Journal of Small Work and how we might envision a different future one small dream at a time.

a list of things to keep, for the Solstice

Sunday morning we got up early and went for a walk to watch the (near) Solstice sunrise. The sun was hiding behind a solid bank of stainless steel clouds, so it was more like an awakening than a rising, but we were glad to be out of doors to welcome the turn of the year anyway. It had been raining for hours by then and the path was littered by the last of the fallen leaves and long pink earthworms drummed up from their hideaways; egrets made patient stalks of the farm fields, arrows of geese passed overhead going north and south and every direction in between. I try always to be out in nature near the Solstice. That’s when the carnival of my mind can settle down and I can start thinking about the new year ahead and what I want to bring to it.

I’ve had so many conversations with friends lately trying to make sense of the world as it is, going over and over the possible whys and hows and wondering if it will ever be healed, but this morning watching the light on the winter grasses, I thought how weary I am of the striving, how ready I am to move forward. Not just from 2020, but from a lifetime of carrying too much weight that was never meant for me. Perhaps you can relate.

The lovely Niamh at Fairlyand Cottage posted a video yesterday about the 10 habits she was going to keep in the new year, and it just fit my mood. Let go the striving and focus on carrying good things forward. I thought about it quite a bit last night and made myself a list of things I have been consciously working on and want to continue in the new year.

Here it is.

I want to continue:

• moving away from a culture of suspicion and distrust and into my more natural state of openness, belief in the goodness of others, and hopefulness.

• releasing myself from relationship and association with those who want to stay in that culture (this is boundary setting for me, not a prescription for anyone else)

• releasing myself from dogmas

• healing my relationship with the feminine by cultivating friendships with women, removing internalized patriarchy, and believing myself

• finding middle ground. Avoiding bandwagons, slogans, labels, and easy jargon. (Work In Progress, for sure)

• not internalizing judgement or criticism from people who are not in relationship with me or who have not taken time to understand me

• cultivating generosity through deliberate giving, deep gratitude and presence, and a mindset of abundance (another very much Work In Progress)

• celebrating the ordinary year with small observances (the Wheel of the Year follows the natural world and makes it easy to be present to the time and place I’m in)

• nurturing myself through

  • daily yoga (I’m doing yin yoga every other day and it is life-changing)

  • walking (I’d like to double my mileage this year)

  • herbal infusions (which help balance hormones, mood, and energy levels)

  • Ayurvedic practices like abhyanga

• making small, daily efforts in writing (I’ve tried a lot of schedules, but this is the thing that works best for me, and it’s how I’m jump-starting my practice again after a long Covid-hiatus)

• building efficient and sustainable systems in my home and work (more permaculture principles, less waste, less consumption, more focus)

• beginning the day with poetry (I copy one poem by hand and read at least one other)

• learning new skills (currently: knitting, sourdough, and herbal studies)

• delighting in whatever feels magical to me: stories, music, art, nature, friendships, and more

• growing flowers everywhere

• challenging myself with books and movies that force me to pay close attention, be patient, and stretch my understanding and comfort level (with lots of room for entertainment too, of course!)

• working on an ebook version of my first novel to share with everyone

It was such an encouraging practice to sit down at this turn of the season and think about what is already working for me and see that I have actually put many good things in place. I don’t really need to make aspirational lists for the new year. I just need to carry on, a little bit every day. What a good feeling at the end of a year that often felt really bad!

I’d love to hear from you too. What is working for you? What good things have you done and want to keep doing?

Sending my heartfelt wishes for a lovely Christmastide to you all.

Happy Winter!

tonia

Writing soundtrack for this post: Henryk Gorecki, Symphony No. 3

Synchronous:

“My work: to do more than reproduce the toxic stories I inherited and learned…My work: to write poems that make my people feel safe, seen, or otherwise loved…”

Jose Olivarez - Ars Poetica

the dark beautiful

I’m drawn to these burrow-down weeks, their shrunken hours, the sunlessness that parentheses the days. My animal-self curls inward and rests. I’ve always been drawn to the dark - not the darkness of demons or evil intentions - but the female places, womb-like and secretive, where seeds go to work, where death is turned back into life.

I love all the seasons, truly, except maybe the fierce, draining energy of high Summer, but these weeks of Advent, these slow unspooling days when we whisper our way toward Solstice and the light’s return are surely some of my favorites.

I’ve borrowed from the Waldorf tradition in planning the Advent observations this year, with its focus on the natural world. Nothing obtrusive, just some candles and whatever beauty comes to hand when I am outdoors. If this year has done anything for me it has worn away any remaining affection I had for the artificial and disconnected. In these Winter days I will find the dark beautiful, the aging leaf, the barren and the damp, the biting morning air, as well as the warm and secure house, the candles and lamps, the stocked larders, the loved ones, that make finding such beauty possible.

I wonder if my welcome of the darkness is exaggerated by the intensity of the year we are leaving behind. I read my journal entries from early 2020 like they are from a stranger’s diary. Who was that woman so confidently and blithely moving forward? These long months have scoured away the last of my pretense - and strangely, much of my anger. I don’t understand the world I live in, I am not as strong as I thought I was, I have given my allegiance to unworthy things. And yet what emerges is not despair or frustration, but peace.

Just recently I have woken in the mornings with words on my mind. I’d thought, maybe, my identity as a writer was dying with this painful year, yet another old skin I was discarding. But of course, like all beings, our creativity must welcome its own winter, its own dark womb of regeneration, in order to keep living. I already know it will emerge changed; I can wait.

I’d love to hear what these Winter days before Solstice are like for you this year. Are you able to welcome the dark hours? Or does it feel too much after all we’ve been through these months? I hope you’ll share.

Soundtrack for writing this post: Olafur Arnalds, Some Kind of Peace

Synchronous: from The Paris Review 234/Fall 2020 John Lee Clark/Line of Descent

“…she

called herself the Black Turtle Lady

because the race is not to the swift. It is to the

slow and sure, certain of who we are.”

(unexpectedly) merry and bright

“There is a sense in which love’s truth is proved by its end, by what it becomes in us, and what we, by virtue of love, become.” ~ Christian Wiman

Today:

A text from my love: “Don’t listen today, okay?” He guards my peace.

Trip to the coffee shop, instead. Early, so the phone-call workers and the mommy-groups and the counseling pastor are not there yet. Writing music in my headphones blending with coffee shop music to make a kind of white noise. Decaf latte. Write.

Later, at the end of the table, an elderly man, spotted head shining under the lights, unfolds a large mat and unpacks two decks of Magic: the Gathering cards. He is teaching a young blond woman game strategy, flipping over cards, explaining enchantments. I look twice to make sure I understand what is happening. Yes, he is the teacher. I snap a picture of him surreptitiously, delighted.

A man walks in. Middle aged, handsome, well-dressed. I make a note of his boots for my husband. He is meeting a girl in the back corner. They talk, and next time I glance at them they have taken little piles of yarn and knitting needles out of their bags and she shows him how to knit, then purl, then begin a new color. They are laughing, he is proud of his progress.

For a few moments I am proud too.

Beautiful, unexpected world, thank you for being lovely today.

Hope your day is unexpectedly merry and bright too, friends.

Peace keep you,

tonia

(Btw, the newsletter goes out today. Look for it in your inbox and pass it along if you think it might encourage someone else!)

advent, the tender season

DSC_6778

Gertrud Mueller Nelson says that Advent comes to us when "Nature seems asleep. The season is dark, and all that is becoming is hidden from our sight."  Much of the church year has a martial, triumphant feel, but Advent, I think,  is a woman's season - deeply quiet, patient, and tender - and that is probably why it draws me so.  It is a time of waiting, nurturing, and anticipating, more than celebrating and doing; the antithesis, almost, of the cultural Christmas season.

In order to enter into this contemplative time (which for us begins on December 2nd) it helps me to work backward mentally from Christmas and imagine how I want the arc of the season to go.  Like many people, I grew up celebrating Christmas as a stressful, exhausting month of spending that culminates in one bloated and excessive day.  When I began to understand the cycle of the church year and how it was designed to focus the heart and mind, that pattern became very dissatisfying.  But because the pattern is so culturally ingrained and difficult to change, we found we had to opt almost completely out of parts of it in order to regain our perspective.  (We are still in the process of shedding old expectations and habits, so what I share here is just a snapshot of our process, not an answer for everyone.)

Except for the young children, we do not give many gifts at Christmas.  Each year is a little different, but for the most part, we have found this area to be the hardest to change and to maintain any kind of balance.  Buying a gift for one person inevitably leads to buying for a second, then the worry about whether the gifts are equally valuable, and will someone else's feelings be hurt or will that person feel slighted and if we're buying this for one person shouldn't we also buy it for that other one and oh no! I forgot your Aunt Martha!  It's relentless.  So we began to opt out from all of it.  Some years, we pool our money and rent a beach house as a family.  Some years we just spend the day together.  But until we feel free of the consumer pressure and hysteria of it all, we will not add gifts back into our Christmas celebrations.

As you can probably imagine, once you remove most of the pressure of gift-shopping/buying/wrapping/presenting you have released a lot of time, money, and energy and it's easier to consider a month of simple, contemplative practices.

Our Advent was a little different when we had children at home.  We lit candles each night and read prayers and scriptures; we also unwrapped and read a different Christmas book each night; we kept a Jesse Tree and hung ornaments on it; we moved Mary and her donkey around a wooden wreath.  (Kortney outlines a really similar practice in her beautiful (free!) e-book. It has many more resources. I highly recommend it!)  Our children LOVED this time and it has been a little sad to move on from it, but that is the reality of life.  These days our Advent-keeping is much simpler.  I purchased four candle holders from Goodwill and some plain beeswax candles and I will make a little wreath with greens and succulents.  We'll light the week's candles and pray from The Divine Hours each night, maybe read from  Child In Winter.  Our church is holding weekly contemplative services on Wednesdays, so we'll go to some of those as well.  For me, Advent is a time when I reconnect with the idea of goodness and hope waiting to be born into the world, of the sacrificial love that Mary, Joseph, and Jesus all represent.  What am I bearing into this aching world?  In what ways am I loving outside myself?  Am I sharing God's love with others?  Are we as a family reflecting light and hope?   In what ways do I need God to heal and rebirth me?

In the still of Advent, the questions of the soul can begin to be answered.

*

It's not all contemplation though, we do celebrate a few days during the Advent season:  mainly St. Nicholas' Day, St. Lucy's Day and the Solstice.

St. Nicholas Day is December 6th and he is, of course, the inspiration for most of the Christmas mythology we have now.  He's a joyful, pure-hearted saint and we love taking time to remember him.  For years now, I have used this day to give books to my family.  I love, love, love to give books and I spend a lot of time thinking through the year what I'd like to share with each family member.  This is a tradition unique to our family, but one I hold very dear.  In addition, we are having a little party for friends this year.  In keeping with the St Nicholas traditions, we'll collect socks for the homeless and do a fun sock exchange and I ordered fair trade chocolate coins to hand out.

St. Lucy's Day (Santa Lucia) is December 13th.  This was an especially fun day to celebrate when our daughter was young.  Traditionally, the oldest daughter gets up early and makes saffron buns and coffee for the family and serves them while wearing a candle wreath on her head.  We never managed a candle wreath, but we will still do the saffron buns and coffee, of course!

Solstice is the longest night of the year and the beginning of winter and we typically observe it very simply by keeping the lights off and only using candles, accepting the darkness of the winter and the gradual return of the light.

*

creche

Christmas itself is a full twelve days and there is plenty to celebrate there too,  (St John's day gets mulled wine!  Yay!) so I'll write more about Christmas as it nears.  It can be difficult with everyone else around decorating their hearts out, but we do wait until as close to Christmas Eve as possible to get our tree and decorate it.  I can't tell you how much I love waiting.  It makes the anticipation of Christmas day so much more exciting when all these little events slowly unfold each in their own time.  We'll bring out the creche around the same time as the tree, and start to slowly fill it with the various figures.  First Mary and Joseph, a few animals, then on Christmas Eve the angels and the star, the shepherds and their flock.  The wise men have to wait for January 6th - Epiphany! - but they are on their way too and sometimes they show up on a bookshelf or in another room, making their way to God in their own time and on their own path.

*

There are so many resources online to help you understand Advent and Christmas, but I hope this gives you an idea of what it can be like.  My main encouragement is to slow everything down and strip it back to something that feels life-giving and hopeful for your family - that's the whole point of this season anyway.  Please feel free to ask any questions!

Much love to you,

tonia