Happy New Year Friends!

The best thing about a new year is that there are so many of them. There’s January 1st, of course. But there is also Chinese New Year. There’s Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. There is Samhain (November 1 making Halloween New Year’s Eve), the Celtic New Year. There’s Hijri New Year for Muslims. I’ve always considered my birthday a sort of personal New Year. So many chances for a new beginning. I do hope 2024 is off to a good start for you!

I was on vacation all last week and will be through Tuesday this week. After the busy day of Solstice cooking it got really hard. All the things I was looking forward to doing on my vacation, weaving, knitting, mending, tidying bookshelves, among other things, I couldn’t do because of my broken clavicle. I was angry and frustrated and came close to tears a few times. James helped immensely when he suggested we get out the card table for a jigsaw puzzle. We laid out puzzle number three last night.

Slowly I adjusted my expectations and resigned myself to reality. I didn’t like it, but there was no sense in being a dark raincloud all week.

Wednesday morning I took the bus for my orthopedic appointment. My shoulder is healing, but still needs more time. Two more weeks wearing a sling. My ortho saw how disappointed I was and told me she understood, but I need a little more rest.

Rest! That clicked some things into place. For all my talk about how important rest is, how we shouldn’t be running around all the time doing stuff, how our worth is not based on how much we get done or even what we do, I realized that I have been pretty self-congratulatory about being good at something I really wasn’t all that good at. Sure I’m not a capitalist my-career-is-my-life ladder climber, I’m good about that. But when it comes to my personal every day life, I’ve got things to do even if they don’t involve going out and buying stuff. You should see my project list!

Well crap. I sat with that for awhile and it wasn’t easy.

I revisited my notes from when I read Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey and was reminded:

Resting is not a state of inactivity or a waste of time. Rest is a generative space. When you are resting your body, it is in its most connected state. Your organs are regenerating. [Your clavicle is mending]. Your brain is processing new information. You are connecting with a spiritual practice. You are honoring your body. You are being present…Your body is a divine temple and a place of generative imagination.

Rest is Resistance, page 153

Hersey also reminded me that I am not resting so I can come back and do more, that is capitalist system thinking. Capitalism creates a false scarcity and makes us believe there is not enough of anything, that we have no time, that we have to hurry to get stuff done so we can get more stuff done. I have to hurry up and heal. Hurry up and finish this book. Hurry up and finish weaving those kitchen towels. Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up! But life is not a race. And “urgency is a myth that preys upon your fears about the future” (page 100). Abundance is everywhere if we can slow down enough to see it.

Resting my shoulder has forced me to slow down. The days have gotten longer. With one hand, I can’t be in a hurry to do anything. Hersey asks,

When did you begin to confuse the idea of daydreaming as frivolous and a waste of time?

Rest is Resistance, page 98

That would be sometime after I turned 16 when I started working to earn spending money and to save for college. Huh, go figure. Before that I never worried about doing all the things. Never worried about spending hours reading a book on the patio or just digging in the dirt and rolling my little toy cars around. Was that a waste of time? I was supremely happy outdoors in the dirt, making up stories for the cars, fully present in the moment, not wishing to be anywhere else or anyone else. I want that feeling back.

I’m not about to say fracturing my clavicle was a blessing. However, the experience of being forced to rest has given me the time I needed and never gave myself to allow Hersey’s message to sink in. If I had not read her book earlier in 2023 and had her words bubbling in the stew pot of my brain along with all sorts of other adjacent ideas, I would have gone through my bone mending and carried on as usual. Yay for tasty brain stew!

Hersey emphasizes how much we have all been brainwashed by the capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal system. The remainder of my life will be unlearning it all while it continues to try and keep its hold on me. It’s a process and a practice. Any practice that includes daydreaming seems worthwhile to me.

Admin Note

I have decided to change web hosting services. The one I am using now is great and I have never had any problems with them. But, it turns out these last three years were at an introductory rate and the rate I am to pay now is too much, especially for my little blog. As the migration happens, if the site suddenly disappears, don’t panic! Hopefully the switch will go smoothly and no one will even notice.

Reading

• Book: Tom Jones by Henry Fielding. A big 801-page chunkster that was! It was pretty entertaining. I want to read The Long Form by Kate Briggs and her novel involves the protagonist reading Tom Jones. So I thought I’d read it first even though it probably wasn’t necessary. The best thing is when I marked it as finished in Goodreads on December 27, I saw I had begun reading it exactly a year ago to the day!
• Book: The Ambassadors by Henry James. The man knows how to write some winding sentences and I absolutely love that. I had a professor in college who made fun of James’s preposterously long sentences and for a long time after that I didn’t read James, which is a real shame. Professors don’t always grasp the power they have.
• Essay: Why I Sang in the Dungeons by Bayo Akomolafe. “There is a tender upheaval swelling in the loam of things: a gentle realization that we are stuck. That we’ve been here before. That whether we take the right or the left, we keep coming around to the same obstinate scratches we left to mark our last checkpoint.”

Listening

• Podcast: Movement Memos: Israel’s Tools of Occupation are Tested on Palestine and Exported Globally. The interview with journalist Antony Loewenstein, author of The Palestine Laboratory, took place before the events of October 7th but aired after that. It put Israel’s response, as well as the unwavering support of the United States, into a whole new context. I learned that Israel is the tenth largest arms dealer in the world and the biggest global dealer of surveillance technology. There’s a whole bunch of other important things in here too. A “preface” was added to the episode before it aired, a short interview with Ahmad Abuznaid, Execitive Director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, about what, at that time, was happening in Gaza.
• Podcast: Forest of Thought: Tree Teachings: Per Ingvar Haukeland. Haukeland is an ecophilosopher, activist, and professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway. If you like trees, and who doesn’t, you will enjoy this discussion.

Watching

• Movie: Leave the World Behind. I read the book back in 2020 and enjoyed it but it seemed pretty much like any other world-ending sort of novel no matter how well written. The movie though, I liked it better than the book. In the book it was all the not knowing that drove the suspense. In the movie that’s still the case, but terrifying information is dribbled out, the music ramps up the tension, and seeing that scene with the deer is actually scary.

Quote

I wish you rest today. I wish you a deep knowing that exhaustion is not a normal way of living. You are enough. You can rest. You must resist anything that doesn’t center your divinity as a human being. You are worthy of care.

Tricia Hersey, Rest is Resistance, page 9

James’s Kitchen Wizardry

James made us cinnamon rolls for breakfast this morning that were big and fluffy and amazing. But the real wizardry this past week has been what he’s done with the casserole dish of leftover baked beans from Solstice. They became part of a meal of lentil “eggs” and hash browns, and a leftover meal of lentil eggs, and a meal of beans on toast. There is a little dish left that will find its way into something else soon, I’m sure.