september 2020: what I’m learning and loving

September in Indiana is glorious, and I’ve been trying to soak it all up. But, to be honest, September 2020 has kicked my bum. Sometimes, those kinds of months (or seasons) are our best teachers, as much as I’m loathe to admit it. So here’s what I’ve been learning and loving lately…

What I’m loving

This Bahamas album. Grant got this for his birthday, and we’re all listening non-stop.

Running (ish). I used to run back before we had kids. I enjoyed it, but it took too long once we had kids. It was easier to go to the gym and have an hour to myself with someone else watching the then-babies. I got into weight lifting and loved it. The past few years, as the kids have gotten older, I’ve preferred kettlebells at home. But, for whatever reason, I started running again in quarantine. Part of it is our new trail that is perfectly shaded and two minutes from our house. Part of it is the necessity of getting outside every day. But I think a good bit of it is that it is brainless. I don’t keep track of my distance or pace; I just run/walk for a set time, not worrying about any kind of competition with myself or others. It takes the achievement aspect out of it. I’m just getting outside and getting moving. We’ll see how long it lasts, but for now, I’m loving it (or at least loving having done it) and trying not to overthink it.

Sunday family movie night. We adopted this early in quarantine because it is easy to keep Sunday nights free. We make something easy for dinner (usually pizza or nachos) and rotate through who gets to pick a movie (with veto power from Grant and me). We originally tried to do this on Fridays, but it seemed like stuff would always come up on Fridays. Having dinner and a movie planned for early Sunday evenings has been a nice way to kick off the week (plus we eat around 5 if we can and then watch the movie, which means we’re going to bed early as a bonus). Some favorites: Troop Zero (lots of cussing for PG if that bugs you), the CBC version of Anne of Green Gables, the newest Little Women, The One and Only Ivan, and The Absent Minded Professor. Our plan for the Covid winter ahead is to work our way through the Marvel movies in this order.

Our Biden/Harris yard sign. We have never put a presidential yard sign in our yard, but I felt like we needed to let our marginalized neighbors in our very red county know that the President’s continual racist remarks and support of racist and xenophobic policies (not to mention the administration’s corruption, the way he talks about people he disagrees with, his dreadful environmental record, etc.) were things that we don’t support at our home. I’m no die-hard Biden fan, but there are no equivalencies between the two choices we have in 2020. I feel good about speaking up, however small. As a bonus, I thought for sure it would have been stolen after the first week, but it’s been going a month strong.

Soup season. I love the garden, but I was really ready for some cooler temps, so I could have an excuse to start making soups again. Here are some of our go-tos.

What I’m learning

Grief season. According to Traditional Chinese Medicine, fall is associated with the lung and large intestine meridians (the energy lines that run throughout our bodies), and the emotion associated with the fall is grief. I think this fall, especially, is an invitation for all of us to sit with our grief. We have all experienced it in various degrees this year, just by living through a global pandemic even if your job hasn’t changed or you don’t have kids to homeschool or you don’t know anyone who has had Covid. But for many of us, we’ve experienced grief on top of grief with no let up this year. If we don’t deal with it, it will deal with us, or as Pema says more eloquently, “Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.”

My yin practice and my more personal value of living seasonally invite (force) me to sit with the emotions that are likely to come up based around the seasons of the year. As an Enneagram 7 who prefers to optimist her way out of everything, I really need this practice of forced reflection on the more unwelcome emotions. There is so much to grieve right now – personally and collectively. The wisdom of nature tells us that the fall season will support us if we set aside some time to sit with our grief. Here’s how I usually do that practically:

• Journaling: do whatever works for you obviously, but I like to ask myself questions at the top of my journal. Usually some variation of “what are you feeling?” to get into my intuition and the feeling part of my brain versus the thinking part. A few things that have helped me with this practice: I don’t edit myself. I throw it away when the journal is full (ripping out any pages that were especially insightful, of which there are typically only a few that I feel like keeping). I set a timer to try to keep writing for a minimum of 15 minutes because I’ve noticed that it takes my brain at least five minutes to back-off to get to the good stuff underneath.
• Yin yoga: the quiet and stillness and seasonal aspect of my practice helps me to tune inward and pay attention to what I’m feeling underneath things, if that makes sense. My yin practice lets me know what I need to deal with on any given day/week. (Join me on Monday evenings via Zoom or at Shine if you want to try it out!).
• Getting outside without my phone. Some people have “quiet time” or pray the rosary or go to church, but the way I get in touch with God is to get outside, preferably alone with no other distractions.

Language matters. I’ve been having tons of conversations about this lately. I keep hearing people criticizing others for “getting political.” This criticism also tends to shut down conversation. We are all political. Politics is about how we structure our lives together. What we criticize, fairly, is the increased partisanship over the last 20 years that has gained tremendous speed over the last four years. If you aren’t “getting political” right now, you’re on the side of the status quo. If that works for you, fine, but our language around politics matters – now more than ever.

This language thing was a theme because I also listened to this podcast episode, which made my brain explode on several occasions, but most notably because the guest said that, in the original texts of the Old and New Testaments, nearly all of the “yous” were communal yous, not individual yous (she explains this more here). So when you see a famous verse plastered on a poster like “For I know the plans I have for you,” us Westerners think that God has some great plan for me, individually. Now while that might be the case, the you in that Jeremiah verse above is actually referring to the Hebrew people that were in exile – to all of them collectively. That distinction matters – the language matters. In modern English, we don’t really have a word for the communal you, except for possibly “you guys” or “ya’ll” neither of which are used in more formal language. Because we don’t have a formal word for the collective you, that messaging gets lost in translation. This is obvious in theology, but also makes me wonder what else we might be missing in translation.

We’ve never done this before. I recorded a little story on Instagram back when Covid was just starting reminding myself that none of us have ever done a global pandemic before. But as Covid has stretched on (and on and on) and so much has piled on top of it, I found myself getting really frustrated with myself that lately, again, I’ve felt like I’m trying to run through sand – it’s like I’m perpetually exhausted, somehow feel like I am doing too much yet not having anything to show for it, and on top of it all, I’m just annoyed with myself that I feel like I can’t get. over. it.

But then I swear I’ve seen or heard nine variations of this Tweet in the last ten days, and I’ve felt a little less alone:

With the next month (or more) promising to be a shitshow with rising Covid cases and the President asking his followers to intimidate voters at the polls along with who knows what else because it is 2020, I am going to try to adopt this friendlier attitude toward myself, my moods, my energy level, and my motivation. Because of past experience/practice, I know that if I can speak more kindly to myself, I’ll have more compassion and patience for others too. And no matter what October holds, I can be pretty confident that I’ll need more of both.

Let me know what you’re learning and loving lately in the comments!