Historically, I love a new year. A distinct line in the sand, a turning of a page. All those old cliches which quite frankly, I’m into.
But this year? Meh. Time feels so disjointed to me that I just can’t quite get it up for new year cliches like I would usually. (I would like to caveat however that a ‘Happy New Years!’ wish? ALL OVER IT. I WILL WISH EVERY HUMAN AND OCCASIONALLY DOGS A HAPPY NEW YEAR. I’M A MF CONTRADICTION AND FINE WITH IT.)
Rather than the start of a new year, I’m enjoying feeling like there’s a moving through a season instead. A continuation through what came before, instead of a definitive ending/beginning. A blossoming?
Let’s fucking hope so.
I feel like I’m getting ready to emerge too. Not just from winter, but from something much longer and deeper… happenings more intricate than that one season could hold. Personal and collective, big and small.
After writing this, this little nugget landed in my inbox:
“Winter is a time to explore timelessness; this in-between space of the completion of one growing season and awaiting the birth of the next cycle of growth…..An understanding that there is no real completion to a season, each night feeds and renews the following day. It is here at midwinter that we return to the origin: darkness. This is why January is named after Janus, the two-faced god, who is looking both forward and backward, who is both young and old. By name alone, January holds this expansive space, moving outside of time. Each season with its own paradox.”
I have absolutely felt this timelessness and am pretty enamoured with the idea of an ‘expansive space, moving outside of time’. In fact it’s what I’ve always said January should be - something soft and laced with tenderness towards ourselves and others, with pockets of quiet and time to just be. December is always so full - there are plans and people and fullness. I want January to be lean in a specific kind of way - a sexy sparseness, if you will. My very own empty landscape.
And so it’s probably no surprise that literally anything written with any kind of NY call to action has not been speaking to me. Instead, my people this time around are brazen in their DGAF-about-new year-ness. Marlee wrote:
I don’t want to reflect on this year. I don’t want to plan my big dreams for next year. I don’t want to think about how special certain moments were or how somedays actually almost killed me.
I’d really like to just have today. I want to just be in today, pay attention to today, and have fun today.
It me! Today the day shone in that heartbreakingly beautiful way it reserves for deepest winter. I took my son to school and soothed him like I did when he was small. We had the first frost in months. I walked up one of the biggest hills in my city (which I’ve never done before) whilst singing outloud and stopped to watch the sun through the trees. My husband came to meet me and we walked over hills to the sea and watched it glisten whilst shouting new year tidings at strangers with dogs. Some evidence: (since tiptoeing away from IG I find my daily phone photos homeless. Indulge me.)
The days are getting brighter and colder, and in my garden the many (many, many) bulbs I planted last season are breaking through the earth.
I’m so quietly optimistic about tomorrow it could break your goddamn heart.
But for now, today.
Happy New Year friends.
Shares for the week:
Read:
This essay by Sara Fredman (who has a newsletter!) was just *chefs kiss*. If you click one link in this newsletter, should probs be this one. On having children and art and death and creating in the cracks:
Like all neurotic writer-mothers, I have seen myself in Alice Notley’s “for two years, there’s no me here” and injected Maggie Nelson’s talk about going to pieces, skirting obliteration, into my veins. But by now I have seen myself split and cohere and split again enough times that it has come to feel like an established identity. I have gone to pieces before and I have seen the pieces come back together, sometimes in surprisingly fertile ways. I remember reading an essay describing Adrienne Rich as “stable but unfixed,” and that is the state I imagine myself inhabiting. Transformation can be as constructive as it is destructive, even if the new structure doesn’t look particularly solid.
Maybe when we look for coherence, we’re looking for something that our bodies already know isn’t possible. Motherhood is a splitting but it also isn’t, the same way that writing is, and isn’t. So maybe coherence shouldn’t be a goal, maybe it’s a trick meant to distract us from the work left to do.
There were so many good newsletters this week. Maybe everyone else is getting it up creatively for the New Year in a way I just can’t muster yet… Rachel wrote about fun. Ann wrote a list of her favourite sentences from the past year (which has prompted me to merge this and an Austin Kleon practice and start recording my own favourite lines in digital and notebook form). Jami wrote about the versions of ourselves we hold. Heather shared an extract from her book about marriage in the NYT and then wrote about the experience of writing about that and sharing it on the internet (I cannot WAIT for this book, FYI).
The idea that I’m miserable and I’m promoting resignation and contempt is a hilarious side effect of how moralistic and reductive our culture is about marriage and writing and personality and opinions and everything else under the sun. But motherfucker, you don’t have to become the living embodiment of a Live, Laugh, Love sign to stand up for joy. Defending your right to feel irritation and impatience and random bouts of misdirected lust is the same thing as defending your right to feel joy. We are big, complicated animals with hurricanes of emotion racing through our microbiomes. It’s fine to feel all of the fucking things. It’s fine to step outside the weird little corrals our culture built for us and say, “Uh, this feels wrong to me, I have mixed feelings, maybe that means I’m a total dick, but I feel weird.”
In non newsletter related content, I liked this extremely practical, very simple little list.
11 Get the lighting right: turn off the overhead one, turn on lots of lamps (but turn off when you leave the room).
67 Sing!
91 If in doubt, add cheese.
MENS? I BEG OF YOU. TURN OFF THE BIG LIGHT.
Listen:
I currently have this song on repeat:
Look:
‘til next time bbs,
Lx
"But even making this small and circumscribed decision feels like a step forward and I wonder if, in midlife, I have suddenly become an optimist, willing to give up some small measure of control amid the chaos and take a chance on hopeful abundance in the face of terrifying scarcity."
😭 It's this for me.