Looking Forward
I love ruminating on a year as it comes to a close. I remember lying in bed on New Year’s Eve as a child and quietly reflecting on the events of the past 365 days. Now that I’m a woman, wife, mother, and farmer I prefer to do this ruminating under a beast that does the same. This meditation has extended for days as I try to use the events of the past year to shape me, guide my goals for the future, and plan for the year ahead.
This year I’ve felt a hasty panic trying to grasp for memories that aren’t there, events that didn’t happen, the blessings I didn’t realize, or the failings that will teach me to improve. In itself, the inability to reflect feels like a failing, so entrenched has it been as a tradition in my mind.
In part, this is a reality of my season of motherhood and in part, it is the function of my work. When I have a project it is done with single-minded obsessive focus and I’ve been furiously working as the editor of a new homesteading magazine with short deadlines staring me straight in the face this month.
But it is, as I said, also a reality of a new phase of motherhood I find myself in.