Friends—
Happy New Year? As I'm writing this, CNN is covering an attempted coup d’état in our nation’s Capital—a televised insurrection turning a hopeful holiday greeting into a question of reality instead of an optimistic exclamation.
This is my fifth year sending an independent holiday card, and I've started, stopped, and torn up this draft since Thanksgiving. In part, there are more pressing concerns in our world right now, and partially, I simply haven't known where to begin. I believe the most painful thing a writer can experience is an inability to find the words, and 2020 left me agonizingly speechless.
Like many of you, I started last year optimistic; it was the beginning of a new decade, and for me, after a couple of years, New York was finally starting to feel like home. For as long as I remember, at the end of each December, I choose a word for the following year, and I'd chosen "grounded"—an intention to truly feel the Earth beneath my feet, to reinvigorate my creativity and put down roots—to be wholly present in the city that never sleeps. I walked into the year with intention, starting last January with a street photography class, new LinkedIn and Hinge profiles and a cozy new sofa for my roommates and me to bond over terrible reality television in our shoebox Manhattan apartment.
But March came too quickly last year, and a weekend trip home to Georgia for my birthday turned into a months-long stay. Despite some days feeling like the only people in the South taking coronavirus seriously, we made the most of quarantine. I watched "Lost" for the first time and then built an island named "Dharma" in Animal Crossing. We planted a garden, and I grew five watermelons and accidentally killed just as many pumpkins. We finally left the house in June to go to a BLM protest as a family; it would be one of the many times this year I'd cry.
The summer heat brought the end of my lease in New York and a new Taylor Swift album. In July, I trucked all my possessions to a storage unit in Queens and listened to "Folklore" on the farm until August slipped away like a bottle of wine.
When the leaves started changing, my best friend and I went on a camping trip in Utah. Laying outside one night, I saw the Milky Way from horizon-to-horizon… and, with it, felt a flicker of hope for the first time all year. I ended up spending most of autumn out West, where the trees, fresh air, and the rocky landscape became a source of sanity and hope. I celebrated the holidays with my family on Mask Road—a fitting address to end 2020 and nearly 1,000 miles from the now vacant Hell's Kitchen apartment where the year began.
In the end, my intention for the year—to ground—was more about finding a home in myself when the world was on fire than settling down in a ZIP code. As I look at the road ahead, I have more questions than answers, but I do know this—we are more resilient than we ever thought possible, and change is coming. And that gives me hope.
My word for this year is simply "rest." One of my favorite poets, David Whyte, writes this about rest:
"Rested, we are ready for the world but not held hostage by it, rested we care again for the right things and the right people in the right way. In rest, we reestablish the goals that make us more generous, more courageous, more of an invitation, someone we want to remember, and someone others would want to remember too."
I hope, whatever the last twelve months have brought for you and whatever happens the next twelve—that you find rest too. We're stronger than we think we are, 2020 taught us that.
Soft Front, Strong Back, Wild Heart,
~ JM
