I've learned to do so much quietly. I can, with swift feet and the large peanut jar, feed all of the hollering birds before dawn, standing in the dark in my slippered feet, tossing the nuts on the grass instead of the table so that the usual clank is replaced by the softest thud, returning inside through the screen door I know just how far to open so I don't reach it's squeak, and the third wood floorboard to step over so that it doesn't have to groan under the weight of me as I get back to the work of the day. I've learned to do so much quietly and it's been a gift, because it means that my guys sleep longer and I get more of the early hours, my best hours, really, and it means that I'm not overwhelmed with so much of the constant chatter, my own, the television, the people I encounter. I've learned to do so much quietly, and it's made room for me to think and breathe and grow, to shake a lot loose, and to figure out what I want to cling to - it's amazing what quiet can do.
Standing in the threshold of a new decade, I realize that while I'll be carrying so much of that quiet with me into the new year, silence is slippery. I traded a bit of my voice this year for the quiet, not that it was necessary, I firmly believe you can have both, but I wasn't in a place to do well with sorting, so some things had to be set down so others could be held. In these past couple months, I felt my voice like a tickle in my throat, that almost always inconvenient and poorly timed reminder that for all the control we have, all the planning we do, we can't always plot everything. Voices, like the coughs we stifle in silent rooms, show up when they're ready, demand to be heard, and even if we're doing our best to hold them in, we hear them, we know them, knocking on our hearts, asking to be out in the world.
This newsletter, started and abandoned years ago in the overwhelming wave of "How am I going to do all this?" and the earnest, but misguided "I just have to figure out how to do it all well!" is the first thing I knew I wanted to bring back. It was always unapologetically me, my voice in it's most sincere form, wordy and willful, brimming with things I want to share that both matter and don't matter (though maybe the latter matters most?). It is my hope that these messages, sent once or twice monthly on Mondays, the most maligned, most mundane of days, find you, and me, exactly where we are, needing to give voice to this life, unsure what that even means, but ready to give it a ruddy good try. I'll be doing what I've always done, sending a few thoughts in longer form, sprinkling in some of what I'm loving, adding in a gift from me to you, updating you about what I'm working on and where/how you can support me if you'd like some of my work, and generally just making a little spot in your likely very full inbox where extravagant hope can take a stronghold.
I'm simultaneously terrified and emboldened by what's yet to come this year, and the truth is, it won't come to fruition without a willingness to be myself every chance I get. Thank you for letting me show up for you.
