The world speaks to us all in different ways. For me, it has always been the written word that carries the wisdom of the universe and deposits it into my heart. Authors and musicians have long been my heroes for the artistry they bring to the human experience. As this crazy year draws to a close and I search for a path forward into a better tomorrow than yesterday, I've found my way out of the chaos through words and the connections to those who brought them to me.
The last year that was this hard on me was 2016 when I lost my mother and the world descended into something unrecognizable. I learned lessons that year and spent the time since then searching for the good that emerged out of it. In some ways, I expected to handle this pandemic better than most because I felt prepared for disaster; it didn't seem like anything could be worse than what I lived through already.
But we all know how that turned out...2020 had its own special blend of surprise, bewilderment, and downright tragedy. I don't even have to explain it - everyone living through this terrible year already knows and has their own version and story to tell. Sometimes it was easy to wallow in the misery...and believe me, there were days when I Wallowed In the Misery.
In the midst of the awful, though, there were some really wonderful things. Hard things were balanced by good things. Sometimes I had to look for them...had to look pretty hard...but they were there, often hiding inside a song, a moment, a book, or a conversation. So my year-end post this year will do both; acknowledge the worst and celebrate the best of my year through the wisdom of the authors and artists who saved me.
I'm starting with words - they're my first love, after all, and have seen me through a lot of my highs and lows. And top of the list is Glennon Doyle. Untamed is the book of the year, in my opinion. I don't think it was an accident that it ended up being released in March...that's when the whole world fell apart and it's when I began to put my life together the way it should have been all along. This is the third book I've read by G, and I was waiting for it. I didn't know it was going to affect me so profoundly; I've read it three times through already and I find more and more each time that gives me pause. Untamed was not what I was expecting. I had to set it down sometimes because it was challenging my way of thinking and I needed to sit in the quiet stillness with it. "I looked hard at my faith, my friendships, my work, my sexuality, my entire life and asked: How much of this was my idea? Who was I before I became who the world told me to be?" Staying home and being very still during the pandemic afforded me the opportunity to really examine myself under that lens. To be honest, I'm not sure I love everything I discovered about myself, but there is real power in understanding who you are for real, when you strip away everything external.
Which brings me to teacher number two. While Glennon focused my attention on the influences the world has on me, Jen Hatmaker's Enneagram series peeled back those outside layers and helped me discover who I was at my center. It turns out I am a hard-wired 2, and the 2 is known as The Giver. Her world revolves around relationships, and her value is rooted in what she can give to others. In her best light, The Giver is there for others, she's a listener and a caregiver and feels personally responsible for others' happiness. In her worst light, a 2 will sacrifice herself for others - rule number one is that their comfort comes at the expense of her own. I know this about myself already, but I didn't know how deeply ingrained it was in my psyche until Covid took away my access to people. I mean, It's REALLY hard to be a Giver to people when you're not allowed to interact with people! And it turns out that being a 2 has some real downsides - since they put everyone in front of themselves, when Covid separated me from the world, I discovered that I only had myself to take care of. I had no idea how to do it.
So I tried to work on that a little this year. I established some routines I didn't have before - I started running again and biking again, and spending enormous amounts of personal time reading and listening to my inner voice. She's normally pretty quiet, but she got louder in the silence of the world. I also established some boundaries this year I didn't have before, and the results were rather mixed. I discovered that some people in my life responded really well to that, cheering on my autonomy and supporting me; others disappeared from the landscape. It's possible that I was only valuable to people because of what I gave to them...and if I wasn't giving to them, I wasn't worth keeping around. Ouch. So that was a whole process...I had to do a lot of reading and self-therapy to help me work on my feelings about that. And I still have work to do on it - I might have to work on it for the rest of my life because as Glennon keeps reminding me, the world made me this way and it doesn't just disappear overnight.
Teacher #3: Alicia Keys. My book club family suggested this read and the perfect design of the Universe was never more evident when I read it. What else could possibly explain how Glennon woke me up to the world and then Jen shined a light on who I was and then Alicia drove the point home? "It’s hard to pinpoint the precise moment when we internalize [the world's] assessments; it’s usually not just a single experience but rather a series of moments that bruise the spirit and lead us to distrust ourselves and those around us. And then we wake up at age seventeen or twenty-five or thirty-seven and realize we don’t know the last time we’ve lived life only to please ourselves.” Please myself? What in the world is that? I'm a wife and a mother and a teacher...and an Enneagram TWO for heaven's sake - we don't please ourselves! But this summer, I decided I was going to try it out.
The pandemic gave me such a gift in this regard; my usual summer responsibilities were out of rotation, so I had hours and hours to just please my dang self. I graduated from SNHU with a master's degree in English Creative Writing. I lost 25 pounds. I got a great tan. I socially distanced my way to Chicago and Lake Michigan with my best friend. There is really nothing that six hours in a car with Cyndi can’t fix...sometimes I wish I could just plan a six hour road trip once a month and that might be the solution to every problem ever. Anyway - add the road trip to the vast expanse of Lake Michigan laid out in front of us, the softest sand between our toes, and I guess my family’s just lucky that we decided to come home...for awhile it was maybe a question. On top of that, every single day I sat in my backyard, looked out at the blue waters of Budd Lake, and lost myself (or found myself) in a book or a music playlist. Books and music and water and stillness...a powerful combination.
When school started in the fall, I finally felt very centered. The extreme lows during reflection this summer were fading; I felt stronger, more in touch with who I am. I already knew that school was going to be different and I had been preparing for it all summer long. I was going into it in the best possible way...and it still completely kicked my ass. (Sorry. It did.) This teaching year, number 21 for me, was the hardest year I've ever had by a long mile. Look at me, talking about it like it's over and it's only December...!
But if the written word saved my summer, music saved my fall.
If it's the last thing I ever write, I want to say that music education might be the answer to all of life's problems. I mean, I'm a super big fan of reading, obviously, but great words set to MUSIC are genuinely next-level. My youngest years were saturated with great music that my parents had on repeat in my home - my earliest memories are all accompanied by a soundtrack. When we moved to Blue Earth I was ten years old. It was the biggest school I had attended so far and it was also the first school I had ever attended that had a music education program. It's important for me to talk about this; I know that I would never have developed the relationship I have to music without it.
We had two hours a week devoted to music class. When I heard about it for the first time, I remember being in absolute disbelief - it felt wrong, somehow, that school should be that much fun. I used to watch my elementary music teacher float around our music classroom, graceful and beautiful, arm outstretched, directing our young voices and I absolutely worshipped the ground she walked on. She let us lay on our stomachs on the floor with tiny pencils and paper; she played vinyl records and asked us to identify pieces of music. She told us stories about musicians, talked to us about their lives and their passions, and explained how the music told their stories. She held the secrets to mysterious things like time and key signatures - concepts that were completely foreign to me. It was my favorite class...and then I got to high school where I landed in the classroom of one Mike Ellingsen.
I could write for three more days about Choir. But this is what you need to know, really. I can still sing almost every song I ever sang for him and it was almost thirty years ago. I still know all the words to everything. (Even Zigeunerleben and Regina Coeli!) You only have to say the word "Amahl" to me and I have an almost physical response to it. He was perhaps the most singularly passionate teacher I had; a particularly good performance of ours would move him to tears sometimes. I know I was supposed to be watching his hands when he directed, but I always watched his face. I could tell if we were on or off by a slight furrow of his brow, by a lift in the corner of his eye, or by the way he sometimes demanded more from us by stepping a little bit closer, as if he could bring it forth through sheer will. No matter what, he smiled broadly at the close of every performance; if we were great, he smiled through tears, and I felt a swelling of pride when we could elicit that from him. I know that the reverence I hold for music today is born of their work; I don't listen to music, I experience it.
Fortunately for me, musicians found inspiration in this pandemic too; they laid bare their souls this year and bravely handed it over to the world and said, "here - take this and feel better." There are a few in particular that are moving me through this exceedingly difficult fall and winter season. My #1, Eric Church, delivered some incredibly powerful new music this summer, tackling world issues and daring to criticize the country music establishment. Cyndi & I saw Ashley McBryde last summer, and she’s become our favorite new country artist - I think she wrote a song just for us, because “Hang in There, Girl” is our ANTHEM...she finally released it as a single this fall and it seems to pop up just when I need to hear it the most. Taylor Swift's new music has been playing on loop; there's something really beautiful happening with her lyricism lately, and this particular sound she's working with has this soothing, calming effect on me - I can't get enough of it.
Tonight my kids gave me an early Christmas present...I'm a collector of vinyl records and they gave me Chris Stapleton's new album. When I had heard his newest single the first time, right as the school year was beginning, I cried. On my way to a grocery store pick-up the song came on when I was parked and waiting for them to come out to my car. I had just finished a week of back to school workshops and I had finally started to realize how HARD this year was going to be. I didn't feel like a veteran teacher, I felt kind of terrified, to be honest. The opening line of the song..."Well the road rolls out like a welcome mat / to a better place than the one we're at"...it kind of broke me. I didn't know until that moment how close I was to just bolting - I was that stressed out by all the changes and uncertainty of the school year looming in front of me. By the second verse, the lines "This might not be an easy time / there's rivers to cross and hills to climb / some days we might fall apart / and some nights might feel cold and dark" I was a puddle of jello. Thank God for the mask I was wearing when the guy came out to load my groceries - hopefully it hid the worst of my big, huge tears. I cried all the way home...for everything that was lost to me this year, and for the terrible uncertainty of what was coming.
I feel like 2020 was a giant reset button....in lots of ways this year, I'm Starting Over.
My kids really know me. Emma knew how much this song, in particular, moved me, and I suspect she was the one behind this gift. When I opened the album tonight, the most perfect inscription was written inside: "In my life when I've needed strength, love, peace, joy, friendship, focus, courage, understanding, hope, or healing, I've found these things in music. As you listen, I pray you find some of these things here. May we all look to the best of who we've been, and the promise of who we can be. Here's to starting over. ~C.S."
The pandemic took away a lot of things this year; it took our activities and opportunities for social connection; we missed softball and track and tennis and the spring play and prom and graduation. The political climate of 2020 became unbearable and social media made it a thousand times worse. I lost people, I gained some perspective. I lost some confidence, I gained some personal strength. But 2020 also taught us to be grateful. I can't remember ever before feeling so GRATEFUL for what I do still have. It taught us to be patient. It taught us to be still. There were hard things - and there were good things.
I'm closing this big long introspection with a poem. It perfectly captures this year, so much more artfully than I could ever write. Best of all, it came from Heather, who somehow knows all the words and finds the right ones at the right times and sends them to me when I need them the most. It’s a reminder that every hard thing - even the small ones, are always accompanied by the good.
Any Common Desolation
can be enough to make you look up
at the yellowed leaves of the apple tree, the few
that survived the rains and frost, shot
with late afternoon sun. They glow a deep
orange-gold against a blue so sheer, a single bird
would rip it like silk. You may have to break
your heart, but it isn’t nothing
to know even one moment alive. The sound
of an oar in an oarlock or a ruminant
animal tearing grass. The smell of grated ginger.
The ruby neon of the liquor store sign.
Warm socks. You remember your mother,
her precision a ceremony, as she gathered
the white cotton, slipped it over your toes,
drew up the heel, turned the cuff. A breath
can uncoil as you walk across your own muddy yard,
the big dipper pouring night down over you, and everything
you dread, all you can’t bear, dissolves
and, like a needle slipped into your vein—
that sudden rush of the world.
~Ellen Bass
