Last year at the end of December, I wrote this post, taking stock of everything that had happened since 2020 began. I had chosen inward as my word of the year for 2020, and oh boy, did I get more of an inward turn than I bargained for! I selected inward out of an instinctive need for more balance in life and more margin, as over the previous years, I’d begun to feel increasingly stretched thin. But instead of the balance I expected to get–the kids starting school fulltime, enabling me to juggle work and life more effectively–we all received something else entirely.
Lockdowns, masks, vaccines, border closures. The chaotic personal and public responses to a pandemic that found us all wrong-footed. It was not what I expected from my year of turning inward. And it was a very, very hard adjustment.
So for this past year, now in its twilight moments, I chose a different sort of word. Touchstone. A reminder to focus on the things that ground me–that serve as a reminder of the beloved prayer all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. And my touchstone year, as hoped, has turned out to be a healing one.
My greatest touchstones of 2021 weren’t the ones I expected. I’d anticipated they’d be personal in nature–moments carved out to just dwell, revisiting books and music and films that I love. I envisioned a touchstone year being mostly about me, holding onto my own comforts for dear life. And in a way, 2021 has been about touchstones I love, but not about grasping them tightly. It’s been about holding them out to others.
2020 felt like the kind of year that had the potential to break me. 2021, in every meaningful way, has been no different. And yet I’ve rested in it. The isolation and seemingly insurmountable schedule of simultaneous work and school has shaken out into something…manageable. Something where I’ve been able to find incandescent moments of joy.
I didn’t expect homeschool itself to become a touchstone, and yet it has. It shapes our days, giving them structure and excitement and zest. We’ve found a rhythm that works, a range of subjects that sing for us. Long ago, homeschool was something Tyler and I considered for the kids, but dismissed as it seemed like it wouldn’t end up being a good fit. Well, it is. In fact, it fits like a glove. Monday has become my favorite day of the week, because we can get back to our schoolroom and our work of learning about the incredible, intriguing, endlessly lovely world we inhabit. Through the rocky start of going from public schoolers on a Friday in the middle of March to homeschoolers the following Monday, we’ve done a long, slow creative work and come up with something beautiful.
We walk (a lot–outside time is essential for cheerful spirits and healthy bodies). We read. We write. We problem solve. We craft and sing and watch and explore, query and measure and investigate and plan. But most of all, we follow our joy. Learning should be an activity founded on enthusiasm and excitement, not a matter of drudgery. And I love the opportunity to ensure that’s the shape it’s taking for my children.
The second greatest touchstone of the year for me has been books. And while I thought it would be primarily books I read on my own, the touchstone stories have primarily been ones the family shared together. This year, we got into a habit of bedtime read alouds. We’ve shared The Wind in the Willows, Charlotte’s Web, Farmer Boy, A Wrinkle in Time, Misty of Chincoteague, all of Narnia and Dinotopia, Jane of Lantern Hill, Stories of the Saints, and The Jesus Storybook Bible. It has been a marvelous journey, sparking imaginations and featuring several movie nights with popcorn to enjoy film adaptations of books we finished.
So. Those are the bright spots, and they have been all the brighter for shining at a time when the global state of being is bleak.
There have been pitfalls and fraught moments as well. Though I’ve managed to strike a tentative balance between homeschool and work, work itself remains an uncertain thing. No career in the arts is a safe bet, and I count myself lucky every time I sell a book. I want to do this forever–it is, without exaggeration, my dream job, and connecting with readers makes every moment of uncertainty worthwhile. But the reality is, that anything beyond the work of crafting an excellent story lies outside my control. I cannot in any meaningful way impact sales numbers or success. All I can control is the book itself–the characters and themes that rest between the pages.
The story and only the story, I’ve realized over the course of the past year, is my publishing touchstone. It is easy for things beyond that–platform-building and trade reviews and royalty reports and Best Of lists–to feel like they matter most. They don’t (or shouldn’t). What matters is me and the words, and that at the end of every story, I get to place a book on the shelf that I’m proud of. That I know got the best of me, right now, as I am.
That is why, for 2022, I’ve chosen the word retreat to define my year. Touchstone brought joy and balance and wonder to the mothering and teaching side of my life. Retreat, I’m hoping, can restore those things to the creative and the author in me. Here is the sense I’m using it in…
Retreat
1. an act of moving back or withdrawing
2. a quiet or secluded place in which one can rest and relax
3. a period of seclusion for the purposes of prayer and meditation
Retreat is both a strategic act and a sanctuary, and I’m hoping to tap into both those facets of it throughout 2022. In honor of my upcoming year of retreat, I’ve already taken a good hard look at how I spend my creative energy and engage in online spaces. I’m pulling back from platforms that I loved but where I felt an obligation to deliver a performance in service of selling a product.
That’s not me. I write books, and you can buy them or not buy them–I prefer you do the first, but I have no interest in spending my time cajoling you into it 😉 I have a great deal of interest in growing as a creative and working on my next projects. In becoming a better and more thoughtful crafter of words.
So I’m retreating to spaces that foster deeper and more meaningful modes of communication. This blog, my email newsletter, and a printed, sent-to-your-mailbox newsletter which will start up this spring and which I’m very excited about (sign ups are here). I am hopeful that this intentional withdrawal, coupled with some deep thinking about the whys and whats of my work–why I continue to create stories, and what I want to say with them–will have the same rejuvenating process for my creative existence that focusing on touchstones did for parenting and educating.
But whatever the outcome, I’m looking forward to seeing what the journey brings.
