Stumbling into a New Year and Spearing Myself with Bouquets of Newly Sharpened Pencils
On New Year in the Southern Hemisphere, why I am thankful for Lent & free LINKS FOR EVERYONE!!
The beginnings of a year line up very neatly in the Southern Hemisphere. January first flicks over on the calendar and it’s a new school year. New school supplies. New teachers. New friends. Sometimes new jobs. New Year’s resolutions.
Up north, New Year’s resolutions are born in quiet and darkness. The calendar flips, sure, but you’re in the middle of the school year, the hum-drum of normal life picking up again after the winter holidays. I picture Katherine May’s Wintering, and little pale northerners snuggled by fires, the light gently rising at 8am (or even later), slowly nudging them into a new day1.
Down south, we are squinting at the shiny face of a new year in the full 5am daylight, the pointy edges of freshly ironed school uniforms and to-do lists very clearly corralling us onto the straight and narrow after our summer freedom.
I think maybe I could be a better person if the New Year started in the dark. Gently. This time of year too often feels like one minute I’m floating on the lake in the lazy summer sunshine when BAM! Suddenly I’m on the school assembly stage (dripping wet? In my swim suit?) already behind on my homework, and everyone else around me is in a choreographed musical, whisking around with purpose, because rehearsals started weeks ago but I missed it (see: lake. summer. etc.)
Please take this feeling, and then apply it to being a mother of a child entering the school system for the first time, and the performance anxiety triples. Self-reflection? Who has time for that in the midst of memorizing your first-grader’s pick-up schedule and ironing name labels onto uniforms2? It is a strange time to try and start a new habit. Too much new-ness all in one dose.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind bouquets of newly sharpened pencils. I love school supplies. The smell of new diaries (calendars) could be bottled and sold. But I love them all in December. When then they can sit in your cupboard and make you feel organized and hold the promise of this being the year that you Stay On Top Of Things.
I suppose that’s why I’m grateful for Lent. I like that God never told me to make resolutions for a new year. But before Easter arrives, I’m invited into a window with Christians all around the world to think, reflect, pray, confess sin, and listen to the nudging of God’s Spirit in the path Christ-likeness.
So. To my fellow people (especially parents) who are stumbling into the new year about to trip and spear yourself with your bouquet of newly sharpened pencils - take a deep breath. Lent is early this year. And rather than viewing it (like I often do) as a season of doom and gloom and rigid discipline that’s rapidly sneaking up on me, I’m choosing to view it as my chance to rest and cultivate in the midst of the full-on-brightness of a busy start to a year.
I’m grateful for the “mis-alignment” of the church calendar with the academic seasons around me at times like this. I may miss arbitrary school deadlines, but liturgical time has a way of reminding me what is actually important.
For those of you who have kids (or even who don’t!) - how do you find ways to transition back to the school year gently? Anything you do to keep the summer fun going, even when school starts? Let me know in the comments!
Also, I read an article where someone was theorizing why Americans now love fall more than summer (argument was that everyone is now longing for the control and schedule of school/organization/structure of fall more than the freedom of summer?) I think about this article surprisingly often, but can’t find it.
Just Beautiful Links
Thanks to the generosity of the people who are paid subscribers, I’m able to take the time to write this newsletter each month! As a “thank you” to them, I usually include a collection of links to books I’m reading, playlists and internet finds that relate to justice and beauty. This month, these are available to everyone! If you want them next month, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Paid subscriptions are what help me say no to other paid work so I have the time for this newsletter and my other writing projects…. like a picture book about Mahatma Gandhi coming out in April! Thank you!
I am in the middle of a duology by Sue Lynn Tan - a fantasy based on Chinese mythology. The first book is called Daughter of the Moon Goddess, and I’ve started book two. I’ve been enjoying the fact that it’s a page turner with rich descriptions and hasn’t devolved into most YA traps3 (yet!). It has a love triangle and lots of political twists and adventures. (Triangle!! Someone’s gonna die! I can just feel it). It reminds me a bit of the Kdrama I watched last month Moon Embracing the Sun, which was set in the Joseon period of Korea’s history, and is also a fantasy (also about Emperors and political intrigue). I’ve found at 2012 is about as far back as I can watch Kdrama, although I know there are some classics I am missing out on. The cinematography is just so much better in the more recent ones.
This quote on nostalgia from our latest book club read How to Inhabit Time by James K Smith was so spot on! “There is a sort of fascination with the past that is an act of deliberate forgetting: it’s called “nostalgia.” Religious communities are particularly prone to this. Faith is “handed down,” a matter of traditio, and hence faithfulness can be confused with preserving the past rather than having gratitude for a legacy meant to propel us forward. The most significant problem with nostalgia is not that it remembers but what it forgets. “So much of the trouble of this world is caused by memories,” wrote Apsley Cherry-Garrard, “for we only remember half.” The “past” that is pined for is always selected, edited, preserved in amber, and thus decontextualized, even if this past is invoked as marching orders for restoration and recovery. Whenever the past is invoked as a template for the present, the first question we should always ask is, Whose past? Whose version of the past? And what does this invoked past ignore, override, and actively forget? Which half is recalled? Whose half is forgotten?”
― James K.A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully NowThis isn’t just a Kdrama newsletter, I promise, but I’ve had so much fun re-watching Crash Landing on You with siblings this holiday! Still the best Kdrama (if you want to know it’s deep significance, you can read about it here!) - but what’s so fun is the community! It so much more fun enjoying things with people -having watch parties with themed food, and yelling at the TV together. (Maybe this is what people who like sports feel like?? That’s a foreign concept to me. But getting together with friends to yell at the TV when characters are being idiots and guess the next step of the plot and hear what makes people laugh and re-hash key points of political intrigue? YES.) This is my encouragement to get into something with your people this week.
I wrote about loadshedding, power outages, and hope in Advent for Mothering Spirit. If you are interested in liturgical living, or literally just encouraging devotional-style personal essays, go check out this community!
If I am organized enough to send this out on time, you can join this workshop on January 27th by my friend Marina that looks to be refreshing and joy-filled! All about how to look at new beginnings - Marina uses her background in art and museum studies to help us look at our lives with intention, curiosity, and wonder. Probably a much gentler approach to a new beginning than my crash into a new year!
🎵 Epiphany! Lent! We have been enjoying this playlist from Sacred Ordinary Days for Epiphany. We still have our Christmas star decorations up in our kitchen, but pretty much all of the Christmas stuff is down.My Lent playlist has not been updated yet, but here was our Southern Hemisphere/South African flavored playlist from last year.
More fiction I read: The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman(books 1 & 2): Okay, HOW FUN to have a group of octogenarians solving murders at their ritzy retirement community?? Like Only Murders In the Building, but the book version. And the voices of the characters come through so clearly. Good mysteries, and the killers “make sense” but aren’t super obvious OR super how-the-heck-was-anyone-supposed-to-figure-this-besides-the-author -ish.
This Time It’s Real by Ann Liang (YA RomCom). I loved that it had plenty of witty banter. We also got classic rom-com tropes (romantic cynic has to do FAKE DATING and falls in love). But the main reason I liked this book because the main character is a TCK (Third Culture Kid). Her family is Chinese, but they’ve lived all over the world and are now back in China. She’s going through reverse culture-shock, the weirdness of trying to maintain old friendships through technology (yet technology is not enough) the fear of making new friends when you’re just going to move on pretty soon, the strangeness of being back in your parent’s home-country that doesn’t feel like home, the fear of unpacking your boxes or painting your walls because it feels like so much effort when you may just move… I just loved all of these very relatable “TCK” experiences through her character.
The kids (4 and 6) are in to: Story of the World read aloud (YES! Finally! So exciting! I’m learning so much!) For those of you not in the weird homeschool bubble, these are books that re-tell world history in chronological order. So like, this is what was happening in China when this was happening in Egypt and this was happening in the Persian gulf and this was happening in Africa. We are also enjoying Zoey and Sassafras (fantasy stories with the scientific method? Yes! That’s a thing) on audio, and some Ramona.
This is how we do it: One day in the lives of Seven kids from around the world. This book deserved it’s own bullet point. Our kids got this book for Christmas and LOVE this book- you get super cool pictures about daily life all over the world. Any kid who comes over picks it up off the coffee table and gets lost for a while.
Alright! Until next time! - Steph
It’s in my mind, guys. Little cute Scandinavian hygge children. Feel free to correct.
I have SO MANY questions for my Southern Hemisphere friends in Australia and New Zealand about this whole public school thing. It just feels like our system here is perfectly preserved from Victorian England? This isn’t even boarding school, and I need name labels on pencils and the uniform socks. Is this normal? Have other former British colonies evolved? Also, I went through this system 20 years ago, and I get itchy thinking about it and trying to determine if anything has changed.
It just feels like YA books these days have too many people having sex. Like, that’s too much information for me, people. 🤞🏽 I haven’t finished book 2, but so far, so good.
The way I made my life work last year was by doing zero extracurricular activities, but that's melting away... the kids are getting a little older and it's so fun to see them doing something they like. But I think that doing a year of "observation" (so to speak -- school with zero extra activities) helped me understand what I was up against.
So fun to hear about life on the bottom of the world! Just imagine-- New Year's Day in an outdoor pool. There's something really "right" about that!
This post made me smile! I am a South African who has lived in Switzerland for 6 years. I have two little kids and I was recently journalling about this very thing. Just the other way around. How it is so strange that the start of a new school year and the actual start of a new year don’t happen simultaneously here. The New year in SA feels hot and full of promise. I remember the feeling of it in my skin, sunlight and energy. Ambitious new beginnings. I started at a fast run and would inevitably loose pace or stumble as the year continued on with its ups and downs. Here January is heavier. Greyer. More exposed. More tired and definitely snottier. Harder to feel bubbling with that New Year energy. It makes me a better person, I think. I start humbled. I start close to my limit and then trust. I start with hope, a quieter kind. Eyes on God and not me. Refresh, renew. Move me to where You are. Priorities are clearer, like the way the earth is quieter when it snows. Swiss people say they can hear it when they wake up, before they see it. The lack of sound. Snow. Absorbing the noise, reflecting the sunlight.
I am learning to lean into the liturgical year and have really been enjoying the process. Living here has helped me lean into the rhythms of the year, the way the seasons are so distinct and yet they flow into each other. And the rhythm of the church year seems to be echoed by the environment. That being said, I miss the sunlight and the vitality and many many other things about South Africa. I have recently found your work and it does my heart good to read about home from your perspective.