At the Turning of the Year

I haven’t shown up here since the end of January. It’s difficult not to feel like I’ve somehow failed myself in this, but as the year has turned toward its close and the easement has filled with goldenrod, I have been attempting to remind myself that it’s not for lack of enterprise or because of slothfulness. It has been a year all too crammed with activity. And while I frequently feel like the days are so full that they pass too quickly, I am committed to remembering that there has been so much goodness and fruitfulness in the midst of all the chaos.

I sat down and browsed through my phone’s photo app, and I felt the burden lift a bit. There were, after all, still sunrise walks and beach days and daffodils. There was, for a few weeks this spring, a duckling who made her home with us and then fledged. We were adopted by a sweet bonus cat on the verge of starvation, and he now sleeps in our enclosed porch. There were camping trips and many, many post-dinner walks at dusk. But we also missed out on some of the activities I look forward to every year, the occasions I mark time by, like planting a garden and blueberry-picking. Mostly, I felt like I was constantly running out of time.

We do too much, it’s plain. And I wasn’t quick enough to realize it, to my chagrin. We’re now locked into an ever-busier school year, and I will likely be living this life until next June, maybe longer. My girls love the things that keep us so busy and so often in the car, and it’s hard to say no to what they love.

I’ve been asking myself how I can slow down, cut back, reschedule a bit to make more room for more that is life-giving to me. More reading time, more time tinkering with my own words and not someone else’s (although that is joyful work), more handicrafts, more baking, more time out-of-doors. More pauses. More rest.

I turned fifty at the end of August, and I started wearing a glucose monitor, purely out of curiosity (I’m not diabetic). It’s prompted some major dietary changes, not to mention a lot of learning and thinking about what my body needs and what I want the next fifty or so years to look like. A glucose monitor isn’t magic, but if you’re willing to learn from it, it may have a few things to teach you. I’m down 15 pounds, and that’s the least of it. Everything that seemed to be threatening the impending onset of menopause has backed way off, and I can’t help but believe there’s a correlation. Whatever that correlation, I have more energy, looser joints, better sleep, and suddenly glowing skin.

Unrelated and yet related, turning fifty and adopting a glucose-informed lifestyle has led to this rambling but ongoing reflection on how I’ve spent most of the year and how I want to spend the next, and then the next. Not that I don’t already think about time management a lot, because I do. Monday always finds Kendra Adachi in my earbuds. I have the kind of personality that grossly underestimates how long things take, and I will easily make a to-do list that’s twice as long as I can manage on any given day. I’m learning not to do this, but it’s slow work. At fifty, I am finally learning to ask myself what matters to me, to ask how I want to spend my days. There’s always a give-and-take, of course, when you have a family of people with their own wants and needs, likes and dislikes, values and priorities. But it’s easy for a busy mom to put herself last and then never get around to what she needs.

Last week, in the midst of all this ruminating, the power company decimated the northern edge of our property, clear-cutting trees and bushes and wildflowers and leaving behind a veritable wasteland. I returned home on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon to find the job had been done in my absence—a whole ecosystem of thriving plant and animal life submitted to the mercies of a brushcutter. The man who had driven it simply said he’d been told to clear brush, so that’s what he’d done—he cleared all of it. Every last inch. He said he was surprised I wasn’t glad it was gone—it was a lot less for us to maintain. He felt he’d done us a favor. The forestry supervisor called it “exercising easement rights.” Never mind that it was unnecessary to the work that needed to be done on the power line.

I haven’t wanted to weep like that in a long time. Our tangle of thicket, home to varied species of birds and small mammals and which evokes a view of Narnia when it’s covered in snow come January? Gone. Meadow of blooming goldenrod waving under a strikingly blue autumn sky? Gone. The old dogwood tree that heralded warmer days with its abundant pink blossoms every April? Reduced to a pile of logs. Walking the length of our property and surveying the damage, I felt like Frodo upon his return to the Shire at the end of The Return of the King. All had been laid waste. The assessor from the power company who came to review the state of things a few days later agreed with me, thankfully (something I desperately needed), not that anything can be done about it now. It will take years for things to regrow. I know, of course, that the earth takes back her own, and always more quickly than we expect. The birds and beasts will return. The bushes will stubbornly raise new branches to the sky. The goldenrod will reclaim the meadow.

I’m mostly resigned now about the devastation, but there’s been something metaphorical for me, too, in the sight of it. I don’t want my life to feel the way our property looks right now. I want verdant growth and blooming life and vibrant color. I want to be careful not to come at my own life like a careless brushcutter, hacking away at the most beautiful pieces, the wild and organic and Spirit-led things. The tricky part is that our culture seems to tell us that productivity is the way, that in order to have a full life, we have to be always going and doing. Lately, the Spirit has seemed to be whispering to me the reminder that a full life has more to do with simply being.

I’ve decided, thus, to be mindful of that ugly strip of naked land for the next few seasons, to see it as a prompt to care for the landscape of my life. Given time and careful pruning, that, too, will regrow and bloom in the ways it hasn’t been able to this year. Like the earth, my soul has the capacity to take back its own.