One Cobble at a Time

Somehow the beginning of the new year has become the middle of January. Logically I know that this particular transformation only takes about two weeks, but this time the newness only lasted about three days, which feels like an unfairly short lifespan for new year’s optimism. The good news is that I seem to be emerging from the week-long discouragement. Better news is that I was still able to inch some necessary work forward even while feeling discouraged about it all. Always good to remember that the discouragement/optimistic energy pole doesn’t have as much effect on getting work done, nor on the quality of the work done, as it feels like it does in the moment.

This week we successfully accomplished the medical appointment which has been looming on the calendar for five months and for which I carried a fear that Covid would cause it to be postponed or canceled. So that is a huge relief and I can ride out the rest of the current Covid surge with less anxiety. Less anxiety, not no anxiety, because this surge is very surgey indeed. I keep thinking the rates can’t keep going up, and then they do. Last winter’s mountain has started looking hill-ish by comparison. I don’t like that. I also don’t like witnessing the societal Great Surrender, where 18 schools in Utah reach the threshold where “Test To Stay” is required, but because there are only three Test To Stay teams, the state just shrugs and tells everyone to use their own judgement. All of the language and information isn’t saying “help us flatten the curve” it is saying “Don’t worry, this will be over soon.” Which isn’t the same thing at all. I keep hearing that the Omicron Covid variant is more mild. I wonder if it will still seem mild when the deaths happen in three to four weeks.

I can’t control the world. I can’t stop Omicron. My ability to influence legislation is minimal. So for now I’m focused on things where I do have significant influence. I’m finally working my way through re-drafting House in the Hollow. I’m working through XDM2e copy edits. I’m teaching kids to drive. I’m practicing a homebrew yoga in the mornings. I’m making sure we don’t run out of groceries. And I’m trying to stay on top of dishes and laundry. If I keep doing these things, eventually I’ll find myself in spring.

On January 3rd my New Year optimism met my To Do list. This was an expected collision, but I don’t like that it dropped me into a low-level discouraged state. So I wrote a little Twitter Fiction that captures my current state of mind:

The discouragement sat like a lump in the middle of the path she needed to take, so she hefted it to her shoulder and lugged it along with her as she trudged forward toward her goal. Sometimes she gave it a pat when it whimpered as she walked. #TwitFic

@SandraTayler 2:09 PM · Jan 5, 2022·Twitter Web App

That is me right now, trudging along shoving my daily tasks along the road in front of me, carrying a load of discouragement, but still shuffling my way forward. The good news is that I’ve (so far) managed to integrate my new goals and focus into the pre-existing To Do list. My cocoon realizations have helped me alter the trajectory of the path I’m shuffling along. I wish I could trundle along that path with the same joy and optimism that filled me on New Year’s Day. But since that joy and optimism has declined to show up for work, I’ll keep inching my way forward because the best way to get somewhere else is to keep moving.

I woke up and the world feels new. The year feels full of potential. I want to pause and really center those feelings as I mark the change from one calendar year to the next. It is nice to have this feeling on New Year’s Day when so many of my recent years have featured some flavor of dread about the year to come. (2020 2019 2018 2017) Some years I wanted to hide from the coming year, others I was girding up to meet it as a battle. So to receive this one as a gift is an unexpected blessing that I want to hold in reverence for a while, before the inevitable challenges of living have a chance to wear at me.

As I mentioned yesterday, one of the words I grabbed when describing 2021 (and also 2020, they were the same year really) was cocoon. I’m thinking about those tiny containers of metamorphosis today. The protective shell contains so much transformative work which can’t be observed from the outside. From the outside nothing is happening until one day the butterfly or moth bursts free. The phrasing of “burst free” downplays how much work there is in extricating oneself from a cocoon. I’ve seen videos of butterflies working themselves free, slowly unfurling their wings, and orienting themselves to being something new. Exiting a cocoon is work, and is as much a part of the transformation as what happens inside that cocoon.

If 2020-21 were a cocoon and today is the day it cracks open, I have work to do in order to finally be free. This image makes sense to me, because the worst pandemic surge is about to hit. I’m going to need to hunker down. I’ve still got the XDM2e project to steer to completion. There are family and friendship tending tasks which continue. Yet mixed in with these continuations, I’m also glimpsing what this year could be. For the first time in decades, my morning schedule isn’t dictated by the needs or schedules of others. I’m experimenting with claiming that time for me to lay in bed and let my mind wander. Then climb from bed and wake up my body with a yoga practice. Then flop back into bed to write. All before emerging from my room to where other priorities start claiming pieces of me.

The yoga practice has been a particularly useful addition. For the few in-person classes I attended (before Omicron necessitated staying home again), I found a teacher who constantly emphasized accepting our bodies for where they are at. Reach for your toes. It is okay if you can’t grab them, because the reaching is what matters. I discovered that sitting in that reach, breathing in and out, slowly the reach extends farther. By repeating this practice gently day after day, in an unexpectedly short amount of time I can touch the toes I’ve been reaching for. Patience, breath, and acceptance has led to far more progress than I thought possible. Yet I’m not reaching for progress, I’m reaching for the sake of reaching, progress is just the inevitable result. There are so many lessons in this physical practice that I can use in all the other aspects of my life.

Casting my thoughts on the year ahead, January through March are “exiting the cocoon” months. During them I will work, breathe, and reach. I will finish things off to release into the world. I will focus on inward growth and writing rather than on outward expenditures of energy in community efforts. When I get to March things will shift again. I’m not sure how or in what direction I’ll launch, but at some point between now and then my next direction will become clear.

Happy New Year everybody. I hope that you have been gifted with hope in the year to come. If you carry some other emotion today, that is okay too. Let your emotions be what they are. Sit with them and pick some small reach you can do in the direction you’d like to travel. Reach and breathe and accept. Progress and hope will come to you.

My strongest wish in bidding farewell to 2021 is that I be done with it today, on New Year’s Eve. The last two years slopped their events over into January, making the transition muddy. I want this year to stay contained within its calendar. More than that, I want 2022 to be after. All of the events of 2020 and 2021 are blended together in a shared memory mire. I’m ready for after. Even though I know that so many things are still in the middle and will be for a while. Pandemic will continue. Economic uncertainty will continue. Political wrangling will continue. Personal challenges will continue. I am going to be carrying so many unfinished projects with me into this next year. However I still believe that I can cultivate the next year to be something different than the last two years have been. It can feel like after even while being a simple continuation of all the things I began in prior years. The first part of making things feel different is to really mark this New Year’s Eve. Note its passing. Make conscious effort to contemplate the year and lay it to rest before crossing the threshold into the next one.

As part of that effort, I have made my annual compilation of blog entries, correspondence, and private journal entries. It is my One Cobble book that I print into a bound format and set on my shelf. This will be the seventeenth volume. I also printed out The Year Compass booklet and wrote my way through its exercises even though that sort of guided contemplation usually sets my teeth on edge. (Don’t try to make me pick a favorite event!) For once I didn’t let instructions like “list the most important events of the year” tangle me up into an anxiety ball over what in my life counts as “most important.” Instead I treated the whole thing like a snapshot of this moment in my brain. Instead of “most important” I wrote down whatever response jumped to the top of my mind when I read the question. This means some of my answers are tangential to the questions and occasionally I simply declare that the question is shaped wrong. (Who did I have the most influence on? I don’t get to decide that, other people get to decide if I was influential in their lives, not me. Also the attempt to exert influence is an attempt at control, which is a thing pandemic has slowly been teaching me I can’t cling to.)

I’m so earnest about trying to put my pandemic years to bed that I’m willing to come up with three words to describe my year and write them into little boxes. I grabbed the three at the top of my mind rather than searching for the perfect ones. I wrote Exhausting, Growth, and Cocoon. I was quite interested to see a news site a few hours later where a survey had people list their words for 2021 and the top of the list were Exhausting, Growth, and Relentless. There is a shared experience in the year just past which has a million different expressions, but is still somehow shared. I am grateful for all the gifts 2021 brought to me. I’m grateful for the growth I’ve had during it. It hasn’t been a bad year on the whole. So I plan to Konmari this year just past, thank it for what it gave to my life and let it go.

Only a few hours left and then I’m on to something else. I hope.

In theory, Boxing Day (The day after Christmas) is a great day to spend cleaning up, sorting, giving unneeded things away, and generally settling the house after the holiday celebrations. Some years that is how I spend it. This year I aggressively did very little at all. I put together a puzzle, played a couple of games, took a nap, watched a couple of shows. I chose that path because I was listening to my mind, heart, and body, all of which were telling me that I needed rest. So I rested. It felt like yesterday still belonged to Christmas. I woke up this morning solidly in the space between Christmas and New Years. This is my week to drift a little bit and contemplate the year to come.

I’ve actually had my eye on 2022 for almost a month now. I’ve been stewing and thinking about how I want next year to be different. This year and the year prior have melded into a sort of amorphous lump in my mind. Memories are muddled, some of them pulled closer than is accurate, others pushed much further into the past than they actually belong. It doesn’t help that 2019 lapped over into half of January 2020, so that most of that month felt like it belonged to the year prior. We had my daughter’s wedding, and all of the stress of wedding planning and execution felt like it belonged in 2019 even though the wedding landed beautifully in mid-January. Then the transition from 2020 to 2021 did the same thing, with anxieties over the election, capitol hill riots, and inauguration slopping all the way through January. This year I want a clean break. I want 2021 to stay contained inside its calendar year and to start having a different year on January 1st. I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make that happen.

In quest of that goal, I’ve been asking myself a lot of questions. How do I make 2022 feel distinct even while it is likely to be impacted with ongoing pandemic which might want to muddle it in with the two years prior? What do I want to be different in my daily schedules? What to I want to make more time for? What do I want to spend less energy doing? How would I spend my time if I didn’t have to worry about paying bills? Since I do have to worry about paying bills, how do I still make some room in my life for the answers to the prior question? I’m still gathering answers for most of these questions. Collecting the answers into a mental basket and letting them bump into each other and change each other to see what emerges. It might result in me rearranging my weekly appointments scheduling, or in me rearranging my physical spaces. It might result in concrete, stated goals and resolutions or it might result in an intention or feeling that I hold in my mind while I move into next year. I’m still waiting to see what will emerge.

For today, I have some pieces of regular life to pick up and get done (packages won’t ship themselves) and I’ve got bits of celebration to start cleaning up and putting away. I’m approaching it all in a leisurely way as is appropriate in this liminal space between the holiday and the new year.

It started with putting up the Christmas tree. Milo “helped.”

This led to the second phase of putting up the tree, which I call “Milo! No!”

Fortunately the cats seem to have learned from prior Christmas/spray bottle encounters. They didn’t try to climb the tree at all this year. However I discovered that all of our tree lights had gone dead, so I had to go on a fetch quest for new lights. I succeeded.

After all that work, Kikaa reminded me to sit down and take a rest.

But Milo lurked. He seems to regard me as a very complex food puzzle, something to manipulate with cuteness until I get up and give him treats.

I also had one of my kids help me take a reference photo. I’ve started a yoga practice. Right now I can’t reach that foot with my hand, but someday I will.

I put our first ornament on the tree. For us 2021 was a much better year than 2020.

I finally dragged myself outside to go rake up the leaves that were threatening to kill off the lawn. I made a massive pile on a weed patch so that they can kill off the weeds instead.

Tired from raking, I sat down at our little bistro table. I’d only been there a couple of minutes when our Scrub Jay friends showed up and made clear that I should go fetch some peanuts. Which I did.

We’ve named the jays Screm and Lurk. They’re the same pair which nested in our pine tree last May. For a final picture, I leave you with this hand-painted wooden egg I bought in St. Petersburg on my day trip as part of a Baltic cruise. My one regret is that I didn’t buy a dozen more of them. So Beautiful.

Despite its problematic historical roots (I live on lands that were taken from the Goshute, Paiute, and Ute peoples), Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. I love that people gather around shared food and a deliberate intention to be grateful. I love that the holiday invites people into the idea of practicing gratitude. I even love the fact that its problematic roots gives people the opportunity to contend with a deep and complicated history, to salvage the good from the harm. To recognize that those of us who have benefited from past harm have a responsibility to try to move through the world in ways that repair harm. It is on all of us to help create a world that is better and kinder than the one we were born into.

This year I get to have all of my children gathered into my house rather than dropping a box of food on my daughter’s porch and waving to her on Zoom. I am grateful for the vaccinations which make my small gathering possible again. I am VERY grateful to not be in 2020 anymore with it’s perfect storm of November stresses. I just re-read this post where I named each of the contributing factors. As I read through, I was completely shocked to realize that the US presidential election was only a year ago. Time has gone so wobbly, that feels like several years ago at least. It feels as if the things which happened before the pandemic belong to a different lifetime, things which happened during the pandemic are a pocket universe that is both one long yesterday and a long time ago, and then there is now, where pandemic is sort-of done, but not really. Today is the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, but somehow feels like the Saturday after.

Last night on the drive home from work, my son said “Oh. We’re going to have to put up the Christmas tree.” with an air of deep resignation. I teased him lightly about his tone of voice while also checking in to see if he really experiences the Christmas tree as an unwelcome burden in his life. He doesn’t. I likes having the tree up, but putting it up is a several-hours-long project where we haul branches and poles from the basement and assemble nine feet of tree. This lead to a discussion of how Holidays celebrations are consciously constructed, often with a lot of extra work. We create them for each other when we do things like put up the Christmas tree. The grumbling about effort becomes part of the tradition.

But before we can start making Christmas, there is a lot of food preparation to do. And that starts with grocery shopping that I need to go do right now.