slow living – Laura E. Weymouth

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.

It is autumn. The air is cooler, and often scented with rain, and we’ve already found the first few gloriously gold and orange leaves from our spreading maple trees. Autumn is nothing if not a season of transition and contemplation and turning inward, and I’m trying to find ways to honor that. By making time for rest and leisure (a thing my achievement-oriented brain sometimes strenuously resists). By teaching myself to say, come nightfall, “today I have done enough”. By learning not just to say it, but to believe it.

The thing is, for the last few seasons of life, and for the first half of the pandemic, I’ve been very outward-focused, at least when it comes to work and the internet. In a bid to feel a little less out of control during a time when we’re all out of control, I seized at every opportunity that came my way, worked punishing hours, and poured myself into a variety of different online platforms. Unsurprisingly, none of it worked. It didn’t leave me feeling as if I had more agency over my job or my online presence. Instead, it left me feeling like Bilbo after his many years of bearing the Ring–that is, “like butter, scraped over too much bread.”

Obligatory bread picture. You cannot simply mention bread and not *show* bread

So I took August to regroup, and to think about what would actually give me the agency and feeling of security I’d begun to crave when working online. The internet can be a minefield, where ill-wishers wait for you to say the wrong thing, and where, in spite of yourself, you demonstrate the worst of your own personality in the heat of the moment, or in the course of a few thoughtless keystrokes. I’d rather not fall prey to any of the above.

Whenever I’m feeling harried, my first and best instinct is to slow down and turn inward, my own personal rhythms shifting towards a quiet and rejuvenating winter of the soul. So what would that turning inward look like online, I wondered? It would look like finding spaces where I can spend more time contemplating what I’d like to say before I say it. Where I manage the space and the narrative and the tone. It would mean being less present in many places in order to be more fully present in a few.

So I thought over my priorities, and what it is that I really love to do online. I love to write. I love to connect with people. I love to share glimpses of my life. And I know the readers and writers I’ve built friendships with online appreciate those things too. The things I don’t love are feeling pressured to respond to things the moment they happen, because it takes me a long time to process. I don’t love interacting with people who enter a conversation without goodwill and good faith. And I don’t love (or know anyone who does) feeling as if my words might be taken out of context, or twisted to mean something I never intended them too.

So I decided that this fall and winter, and for the foreseeable future, I’ll spend more of my time and energy on platforms that I control, and where I can move more slowly, and choose my words more carefully. Hence the website makeover–this is going to be my primary online home, and I wanted a new, simpler look and to be able to alter and update and keep everything current all on my own. I’m hoping to blog here more often–if you were a follower of my Patreon, it’ll be shutting down, and the sort of content you enjoyed there will now be available here, for the low, low cost of free 🙂

I’m planning to revisit my newsletter, too–during the last year I’ve let it slide, while chasing other forms of engagement. But I enjoyed composing it for all of you. It will now be releasing seasonally–on October 30th, January 30th, April 30th, and July 30th. (If that’s something you’d like to subscribe to, you can do so here.)

A little peek at what’s coming in October’s newsletter!

As far as actual social media goes, I’m limiting that. I’ll still be on Twitter a little, but not to the same extent as before. Goodbye to Facebook (which I hardly used anyway). Goodbye to Instagram (which was always more stressful than enjoyable). But I’m definitely keeping Pinterest, which I really love and find relaxing.

Yes, I have an entire row of boards that are just puns and cute animal pictures, I refuse to apologize for that

And that’s it. That’s the lineup I’ve come up with that feels best, and like I’ll be able to cultivate a balance between my own health and security, and the personal connections I enjoy making with other writers and readers. Besides that, I’ll be spending the fall as I always do–crafting earthy soups, baking yeasty things, writing wistful books, and teaching two little people that there is magic in the world if you only know where to find it.

If you’re interested in any or all of the above, I’ll be here, telling stories at the edge of the forest.

Tag: slow living

Touchstones and Retreat: A 2021 Retrospective and a Look Ahead