A Collection of Disenchantment

“Every tree is a thought, a girl’s hair is a creed, a need is a prayer” -Norman Nicholson

January is a blank page, and there’s a terror to the emptiness. The weight of Christmas cookies rests heavy, everyone has taken up walking and spinach to ward off an early grave and bigger pants. I’ve another semester of school with my children. I need to order two math books.

As I think about how I want to paint my new year, how I want the pages of my life to be written, I also wonder who’s really deciding this stuff. I am old enough to know that a step a day gets you to your destination, and I want to take steps. I am also old enough to know that there’s a danger to planning out a life.

The danger in planning lies in wanting to control the outcome. We are artists, with a new year ahead of us. It’s potential. The temptation to conjure is heavy.

Anything new is full of terrors because we know, deep down, it might not turn out. We can hold a paintbrush and try to tell the truth. Will it change anything? Maybe that isn’t our job. Maybe we just take steps, maybe we just pick up the paintbrush. For the love of it.

In dark moments it isn’t about love, it’s about production. In moments of panic I think a new system will make a better homeschool, as if I’m Henry Ford and my kids are Model-Ts. They don’t appreciate being cranked to get started.

Peace comes from abandoning machinery.

What am I saying?

It’s back to humility. It’s back to the attempt. It’s doing our work and telling our story.

The humble people start rock collections and write poetry and live free. They sit with trees long enough to know there’s a story there too. The machine has no business with them, they don’t worry about products. Instead they listen.

This year I will wrap my smallness around me like a cloak, and write about rocks, and write about magic, but only the disenchanting kind that Auden knows about.

So here’s to a disenchanting year, a year without force and factories, a year of rocks and poems that try to tell the truth.

The sounds of January:

Peter Paul and Mary

January Reads:

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley (but read Parnassus on Wheels first if you haven’t, it’s better)

Books I finished last month that I loved:

The Mousewife by Rumer Godden

Pilgrim’s Inn by Elizabeth Goudge

The Tailsman by Sir Walter Scott

Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens

January Commonplace:

“Pride can’t let go. But compassion?” “That’s the root of all giving, don’t you think? The root of all art. You can’t hoard the beauty you’ve drawn into you; you’ve got to pour it out again for the hungry, however feebly, however stupidly. You’ve just got to.”

-Elizabeth Goudge, Pilgrim’s Inn