The New Years Come, the Old Years Go
The last newsletter of 2024 + DIVE winter writing group + a poem for the final days.
Hello friends,
Here we are, in the final days of the year.
I think that these “in-between days” are so essential. We need the break, we need the pause. I wrote about this last year, advocating for a midwinter season of creativity. I think that kind of a season really does require us to cut off the external demands of our creative work. To go inward.
I’ve personally loved retreating these past few days. I’m currently at a little mini creative residency with some friends. It feels good to turn everything else off, to just focus on the here and now. Avoiding emails is my new favorite pastime.
In fact, I wasn’t even going to send out a newsletter. Not really good role modeling if you tell people to take a break but then don’t take one yourself, now is it?
But there is one timely announcement that I have for you all!
DIVE Writing Group Winter 2025 Session
is leading another session of the seasonal writing group DIVE and if any of you want to make winter a season of writing, this is a great way to do just that. Three months of weekly prompts and check-ins, and monthly meetings with fellow creatives. You have until the end of 2024 (ahem: tomorrow) to get early bird pricing.The in-between days, the in-between month
As the days of this year are dwindling, it’s hard not to feel the urge to look ahead.
Longtime readers of Creative Fuel will know that I like to treat January as a kind of in-between month. Here’s what I wrote in early January this year:
In other words, it’s not a month of launching, it’s a month of ruminating. A month to hibernate, marinate, percolate.
That doesn’t mean that aren’t new beginnings. There are plenty of them! But I try to remove the pressure that they need to build to anything, be anything. Some scribbles in a notebook there, some percolating ideas there. It’s a month for allowing half-baked ideas to stay half-baked for just a little longer, to remove the pressure of needing to make any concrete decisions about them, or making a plan for how to bring them into the world.
And that means that as the year comes to a close, I’m not quite ready for my own reflections yet, or my own plans for what’s ahead. There is nothing that I want to press go on at the precise moment the year turns.
I want to sit in these in-between days a little longer.
If you need permission to do just that, feel free to take it.
Or perhaps, we all take a little inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s resolutions in 1931:
Here are my resolutions for the next 3 months; the next lap of the year.
To have none. Not to be tied.
To be free & kindly with myself, not goading it to parties: to sit rather privately reading in the studio.
To make a good job of The Waves.
To stop irritation by the assurance that nothing is worth irritation [referring to Nelly].
Sometimes to read, sometimes not to read.
To go out yes – but stay at home in spite of being asked.
As for clothes, to buy good ones.
A poem for the end of one year and the beginning of the next
One more thing that I wanted to share before I say goodbye to you all for the year.
A few years ago I found the poem by “The Year” by Ella Wheeler Wilcox. I like it, because it’s a reminder of how cyclical everything is. Whatever we feel as the big pressures, the intensities of our own lives or that of the world, the constant ups and downs, the poem asks us to consider that yes, we’ve been here before.
We are constantly cycling through the same rhythms.
Here’s to the cycles, here’s to the breaks, here’s to whatever comes next.
Thank you to all of you for being here this year. I am so grateful to all of you for reading, for sharing, and reminding me that there is power in creative community.
I’ll see you back here in 2025.
-Anna
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Here's to sitting in the in-between for a bit longer, and to [as Woolf so wisely resolved so many decades ago] being free and kindly with ourselves, come what may. 💛
So grateful to be in community where it is okay and even encouraged to sit in the in-between and allow myself to “winter” in January. Along with Woolf’s resolutions, I love the idea of practicing the line from “A Room of One’s Own”: “No need to hurry, no need to sparkle, no need to be anybody but oneself.” What a liberating way to begin 2025!