Happy new year! Here are a few things that caught my eye.
I subscribe to a fair number of newsletters, but I’ve been trying to hone the list. I did add one though and I’m not sorry. Noted, by Jillian Hess with the apt tag line: “tips & tricks from the world’s best note takers.” Love. Here’s a recent post: 12 Ways to Use a Diary. So good.
I have a, um, complicated relationship with journals. I keep them, but I can’t seem to come up with the right one. Thus, I have many. (As evidenced in the office clean I did over the holiday, where I tried to cram them all in three bankers boxes, but there’s still enough for a fourth.) Here is my current journal “turducken” (to lift from Austin Kleon, whose newsletter I also subscribe to and you must as well), from the bottom up:
1. A Gardeners Journal from Lee Valley (it’s a 10-year journal, to record weather, what’s in bloom, etc. and a recent birthday give to me from a dear friend; I like the idea of tracking the weather and what I was doing in the garden over time. 11 days down, 3,639 to go before it’s filled!).
2. A fabric covered journal—cover made by me (this is the most personal journal—part commonplace book, part “diary,” part scrapbook, part art experiment space.
3. A weekly journal from Hemlock & Oak. This one is new to me this year, but I’m loving it so far. You can look/plan out the year, the month, and each week, with lots of space for tracking, which, yeah, I do a fair bit. Not super portable, but it’s on my desk and we have a close relationship at the moment.
4. A Moleskine weekly planner. This is where I track one or two lines a day, which is something I started a few years ago now and I find incredible valuable. If it’s the only thing you do, do this. I am always looking back at old planners to see what happened on any particular day. There’s no need to overthink the entries—just the basics of what happened; it’s remarkable what you can glean from so few words. I only wish I’d kept these when my kids were young.
Maybe it’s just the new year’s reading I’ve been doing (no surprise, lots of introspection and attempts to set up some semblance of “good” habits), but in what seems like some sort of message from the universe, I’ve come across the same quote from Rumi three times. The first two times were the eeriest—I literally put down one book that ended with the quote and picked up another that started with it. The other instance was today as I was finishing off another book. So, I paid attention.
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened.
Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical
instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the
ground.
(If you are curious, the three books were: An Altar in the World: a Geography of Faith, by Barbara Brown Taylor; The Not So Big Life: Making Room for What Matters by Sarah Susanka; and Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith by Anne Lamott.)
It’s stormy here on the west coast—powerful winds, buckets of rain, power outages, and such. It reminded me of something I first heard about this summer: storm chips. (This clip just says it’s just when people in Atlantic Canada buy chips when hurricanes are looming, but I first heard “storms chips” as a bag of mixed chips, in this case dill, ketchup, BBQ, and salt and vinegar. Sounds disgusting to me. I’d be high grading the salt and vinegar out of the bag!)
My birthday is December 23, which also happens to be Tibb’s Eve, something I’ve just learned about and already love. As with many good things in life (see above) it seems to have really taken hold in Atlantic Canada, specifically Newfoundland, and is a “non-time,” an expression for a day that will never come. As in, “I’ll pay you back on Tibb’s Eve.” So, yeah, I’ll get to all those resolutions on Tibb’s Eve.
Looking forward to reading this: Sacred Nature: Restoring our Ancient Bond with the World by Karen Armstrong. Here’s an interview (which I listened to on a treadmill; oh, irony).
Here’s a new way to mark time: the literature clock. I’m leaving it open on my desktop, so, yeah, I’ll get you that manuscript on Tibb’s Eve.