How to recover the story telling

December 20, 2024

Since my paper writing went on hold last weekend (Saturday at 9pm when I emailed my WIP to my professor, but who’s keeping track), my heart, mind and spirit have been oriented to Christmas preparations.

It's felt so great, so meaningful, to turn my attention this way. I wrote a lot of words about those preparations in my last post about getting the tree and our Christmas plans.

Today I want to share photos from the last couple weeks. Picking up on the story telling (in images) where I left off earlier this month.

herbal tea advent calendar

I love this December.

I’ve thought about trying to explain what I love about it in some writerly, poetic fashion.

I wish those words would come but this post came out instead. But before proceeding to the main body of this post, here is a list of some of the things I love about this December.

Watching the birds at the bird feeder, so far we’ve had 7 species visit (in order of prevalence): Chickadees, Dark Eyed Juncos, Blue Jays (if I try to photograph them outside they fly away and don’t come back so the photo in this post is through the glass of the front window), White Breasted Nuthatches, American Goldfinches, Mourning Doves & European Starlings. The Starlings were new just today.

Everything Christmas in this particular house, a house that is already full of Christmas memories for me.
Living next to my parents while doing everything Christmas.
Going to the farmers market the week before Christmas, the time spent chatting around the table and eating breakfast after we did our shopping, the 4 of us (Dad, Mom, Joah & myself) and our three table mates - middle aged sisters and daughter/niece - getting to know one another and discovering people and places we have in common.
My near daily walks in the woods, whether solo or with my mom. I just love these woods!

All things Christmas. Have I mentioned that yet?
The light! December’s light is behind and through, never overhead. Although the trees are stark the light is gentle. And the golden hours of morning sunrise and afternoon sunset can be spectacular on any day that isn't full clouds. And the dusk with the sky turning blue-indigo at 5pm... it’s stunning to me. I spend some part of each day just marveling at the light and sky and beauty of all of it, accessible right here.
Watching the final stages of the garage loft build and being amazed, yet again, by my dad’s craftsmanship and unfailing generosity of resources, talent, and time.

Being part of this endeavour we call The Sanctuary, providing shelter and a sense of home to family members.
The anticipation of my kids coming home for Christmas and preparing specifically for their arrivals.

Six years ago I published these words about December.

Life is experienced in seasons, sustained by ritual and routine, enlivened by beauty, punctuated by pain. December, like a Queen in her star-studded deep indigo velvet gown, does her best to teach me all this.

I can’t believe I wrote that! It feels like my ability to write like that has left me as I’ve developed and honed my critical and analytical skills in my graduate writing and research.

I wonder if I’ll recover that poetic ability when I’m done my schooling?

I have so many thoughts swirling these days on my writing. What it has become, and how it’s changed. I don't know how to recover what is lost.

Here’s what I do know. I want to tell the story of my life. And I have more than my words to tell that story.

Another thing I know. I want to tell that story here, on my blog. Not on Instagram. Not on Facebook.

I have reflected quite a bit on the transition of my writing to those spaces, how freeing it was for many years (so easy to publish thoughts and photo, right from my phone!). But I'm re-evaluating.

While I’m in a pause and evaluate period with Meta I need somewhere to post all the pretty photos.

How handy that I actually have somewhere to do that!?

My blog turned 20 this fall. I had some thoughts I was writing about that occasion but I’m not much for marking human anniversaries and birthdays, never mind blogging ones. The month passed, I wrote about September’s happening, and my reflections went unpublished.

But I think I will mark the occasion by talking about 20 years of blogging during this 20th year of blogging. Twenty. I’m still shocked by that.

I’m skeptical of historical golden ages (there’s always people who’s lives weren’t so golden during golden ages), but there was a golden age of blogging, and this ain’t it.

And yet, I find myself wanting “to blog” like it’s 2008.

I published 22 posts in December 2008. 22! How is that even possible?! And I was a busy homeschooling mother.

It’s possible because those posts were like social media posts. Much shorter than my current blog publishing, which is mostly essays.

I won’t be going back to that frequency, or how those posts were written, or what they said. I’ve changed, life has changed.

But I am itching to tell the stories of my life with greater frequency and a much shorter turn around. Ie: I don’t want to labour on all my posts for frickin’ weeks and months, when the motivation for posting is to talk about life, in the moment, as it’s happening. Not life in the analysis of that moment.

And I want my blog to be the place I publish that life-in-the-moment story telling, not Instagram.

Will people read here? I hope so. I have some maintenance work to do in that regard to improve those odds, but that’s just life. Always something that needs to be done.

In the meantime, I need to do the thing I want to do, which is post here with greater frequency.

There are so many reasons that this drive is stirring in me but I’m not going to get into them now. I’ve developed a years’-in-the-making habit of going into the weeds in my writing with the intention to uncover things for myself, to understand and articulate motivation, etc. But one of the side effects of that has been that very little gets published because the writing just takes so damn long. Too long to write and too long to read.

There is a time and place for all the long thoughts and analysis of self and society. And the long thoughts are important to me, but so is sharing the stories of my life, sharing the photos.

And maybe I’ll even be able to find the words to write like this again:

“Life is experienced in seasons, sustained by ritual and routine, enlivened by beauty, punctuated by pain. December, like a Queen in her star-studded deep indigo velvet gown, does her best to teach me all this.”

Moving here has given me a chance to start fresh in some things, or to reset some things.

The reviving of “this is my life” story telling is one of those for me.

The Christmas Spreadsheet - basically the menu planning and who's doing in the kitchen for Dec 24-Jan2 - all the days my kids are home

So that’s what’s up with all the posts this December. It’s intentional. I also haven’t been on Instagram (except to check my messages) since my anxiety attack that came right on the heels of my sickness. (My anxiety is back to its normal everyday life levels, thank Goddess!)

I just realized when I added the link in that previous sentence to my early December post (the one where I talk briefly about my anxiety attack) that I have basically already written most of what I wrote here.

As I said in that early December post:

One of the things I wanted to do when I moved to Nova Scotia was to return, in some way, to telling the story of my life on my blog. To steer my writing more memoirist and less analytical.

So, I’ve just repeated myself. But readers don’t read every post and the sentiment is one of the dominant creative impulses in my life right now - just tell the damn story.