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 In one of his Sabbath Poems (“1982: Poem V”), Wendell Berry poignantly captures a new year’s fragility—as well as its fearfulness:
A child unborn, the coming year
Grows big within us, dangerous,
And yet we hunger as we fear
For its increase: the blunted bud
 
To free the leaf to have its day,
The unborn to be born. The ones
Who are to come are on their way,
And though we stand in mortal good
 
Among our dead, we turn in doom
In joy to welcome them, stirred by
The Ghost who stirs in seed and tomb
Who brings the stones to parenthood.
Berry’s poem encompasses the Advent season’s call to waiting and watchfulness, the pregnant sense of expectancy which sits within us in winter as we wait for newness of life to break upon the hibernating world.
 
But we “hunger as we fear” for 2021’s increase. The coming year is a “blunted bud”: already blighted by brokenness, a new and fragile promise of life that breaks simultaneously with an assurance of death. This reality is easy to forget, perhaps, in a more common time. But it’s impossible to ignore as we say goodbye to 2020 and look back in mourning, “in mortal good among our dead.”
 
In an interview I conducted with Leah Libresco last month, we discussed the necessity of embracing risk in order to fully embrace life—our culture has to be “emotionally comfortable with risk,” Leah argued, in order to be hospitable to life’s most fragile and vulnerable.
 
2020 taught us this lesson over and over again. This past year was filled with unknowns. Every day forced us to confront our own mortality, every hope and aspiration was constantly curbed by mystery. To be open and hospitable to life, we had to acknowledge the fact that nothing could be planned, controlled, or assured. We had to embrace the fragility of our own bodies, the needs of our families, the demands of our homes and neighborhoods. We had to make peace despite the bombast of the internet, demonstrate empathy amidst the angers and fears of our relatives and neighbors. 
 
2021, then, requires us to practice a "risky" hospitality in days and weeks to come. “Hospitality … means primarily the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy,” Henri Nouwen suggests. “The paradox of hospitality is that it wants to create emptiness, not a fearful emptiness, but a friendly emptiness where strangers can enter and discover themselves as created free….”

Freeing "the leaf to have its day" requires us to embrace the strange unknown, the uncomfortable and the mysterious in our day-to-day lives. It requires us to practice gratitude for the good, even as we acknowledge the broken. 

I gave birth to my third child, a sweet baby boy, on December 21st. Being pregnant this year brought its own struggles, and forced me to grapple with lots of unknowns. But this little boy has brought constant opportunities to embrace rest and trust, as well.

Now, as I ponder my list of New Year intentions, I've realized I have no idea what life as a mom of three kids age five and under will look like. I don't know what launching a book this March, with a 3-month-old, will entail. So rather than seeking out any grand aims this year, I'm hoping to cultivate a gentler set of rhythms that will help me weather 2021's inevitable surprises and difficulties. This is the list I've pieced together thus far:
  • Take things one day at a time (less planning ahead and worrying over the future, more efforts at practicing gratitude in the present moment). 
  • Rest more. Take naps, enjoy baths, sit out in the sun on warm days, cuddle on the couch with my children on rainy ones. 
  • Read lots of books aloud with my girls.
  • Make long walks a regular habit. 
  • Practice prayer and mindfulness each morning and evening. 
  • Enjoy a weekly "date night in" with my spouse. 
  • Seek out opportunities to volunteer and serve neighbors locally.
2021 will call us all to cultivate free and friendly space in our lives: space for unexpected griefs and joys, failures and victories. There are countless mysteries hidden in the months to come. But we’re comforted by the “The Ghost who stirs in seed and tomb,” present in both death and life. We, like Berry, are called to a parenthood that requires transfiguration: to trust the working of a charity that is eternal, even as we seek to love in a broken time.
Email me and let me know your thoughts on embracing risk, or share some of  your 2021 intentions and resolutions. I'll include some excerpts in the next newsletter!
 
in other news
  •   Alex Shephard writes that we need to make media small again: "Reversing media consolidation—and rebuilding local news and a vibrant, diverse internet—is crucial to rebuilding American democracy."

  • Cook Julia Georgallis shows us how to eat our Christmas trees.
      
  • Nick Offerman considers the legacy of Wendell Berry: "In Wendell Berry, I had unexpectedly found a chronicler of the nobility found in good, honest work, and thrift, and affection for one’s family and neighbors and animals and the land that supports and nourishes all of the above."
     
  •   A beautiful obituary for Dorothy Gill Barnes, the artist who made sculptures from tree bark, and "once wove a basket on a loom with lichen." (h/t Leah Libresco)
essays
  • Charles Dickens' novels emphasized distance and mystery, the prison of obsession and captivity of unjust institutions: "For Dickens, imprisonment wasn’t just a stain on society; it was an aspect of the self."
     
  •   Matthew Miller reviews two books on the Midwest, and suggests "any grappling with the injustices of a place that aims to effect meaningful change must do so not out of bitterness and disdain but must rather come from affection and hope."
     
  • "Beethoven is the composer who first makes music difficult. He represents a watershed in music as Flaubert does in the history of the novel, the moment at which the form becomes self-conscious, measures its new distance from the relative innocence of its tradition and announces to its audience: ‘Catch up if you can.’"  
     
  • Although global free trade "is set up to encourage industrialization of farming," Xiaowei Wang warns, "the ecological and human health consequences of factory farming are dire. ... The origins of COVID-19 are decidedly rural, intertwined with a landscape of multinational agribusiness, industrial agriculture, and a pursuit of modernization beyond China alone."
2020 in books

I got to read 44 books this past year—and wanted to share a list of some of my favorites! Books I'm hoping to read this month: English Pastoral, by James Rebanks, and Landmarks by Robert MacFarlane.

Best books on agriculture, nature, and place
Farming While Black, by Leah Penniman
Midwest Futures, by Phil Christman
The Complete Gardener, by Monty Don
Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillars

Best fiction
Arrival, by Ted Chiang
Death Comes For the Archbishop, by Willa Cather
The Overstory, by Richard Powers
Adam Bede, by George Eliot
Jack, by Marilynne Robinson
Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke

Best narrative nonfiction
Furious Hours, by Casey Cep
The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson

Other favorites
How To Do Nothing, by Jenny Odell 
This Little Light of Mine, by Kay Mills
The Free-Market Family, Maxine Eichner 
The Power of Gentleness, Anne Dufourmantelle
recipes
Feedback for the last edition of Granola: 

"I have been considering the topic of dependence because I have been reading Ayn Rand. I've already finished The Fountainhead and I am 2/3 through Atlas Shrugged.  Besides willingly ignoring a wide variety of practical complications as well as the nuance of lived philosophies, I think the main thing that Rand purposefully misses is the obviousness of interdependence. All of her fictional characters are full-grown when we are introduced to them. They are paraded as the paragon of independence. But she didn't write about the years that they drew their sustenance from their mothers' breasts or learned to read at the instruction of primary school teachers. She does not engage with what life might look like for them as their bodies and minds wear down into complete unproductivity. Further, each of these characters seem (to me) to be the most lonely figures known to man. I suppose that loneliness is meant to be held up as a heroic despair, but each of these 'independent,' full-grown characters have no family of any importance and no meaningful relationships outside of their professional lives. ... I guess independence is a powerful narcotic that we westerners/moderns keep dosing to convince ourselves that the selfish motivations of unbridled libertarian capitalism isn't as brutal, inhuman, and, in the long-term, as counterproductive as it appears to be."
– Paul S.

"[Dependence] is the subject of Yuval Levin's A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream and Tim Carney's Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse, two books that I highly recommend. Yuval wrote a post on National Review seven years ago called "More Than Dependency" wherein he said:
'We are all dependent on others. The question is whether we are dependent on people we know, and they on us—in ways that foster family and community, build habits of restraint and dignity, and instill in us responsibility and a sense of obligation—or we are dependent on distant, neutral, universal systems of benefits that help provide for our material wants without connecting us to any local and immediate nexus of care and obligation. It is not dependence per se, which is a universal fact of human life, but dependence without mutual obligation, that corrupts the soul. Such technocratic provision enables precisely the illusion of independence from the people around us and from the requirements of any moral code they might uphold. It is corrosive not because it instills a true sense of dependence but because it inspires a false sense of independence and so frees us from the sorts of moral habits of mutual obligation that alone can make us free.'"
– Zach R.
 
"I loved this, and it reminded me that not only do we need each other but also that we need to need each other:
'A proper community, we should remember also, is a commonwealth: a place, a resource, an economy. It answers the needs, practical as well as social and spiritual, of its members—among them the need to need one another.'
– Wendell Berry"
– Drew G.
I grew up in rural Idaho, and now live in Northern Virginia. I have written for The American Conservative, The Week, New York Times, Washington Post, National Review, Weekly Standard, Christianity Today, and others. To quote C.S. Lewis, "You'll never find a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me."
 
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