The Long Walk Home

I don’t know what this blog is for anymore but I like this tradition of putting the books I’ve read each month somewhere. It’s been a SLOW year for reading. Turns out that moving, discovering your son has a hidden disability, unschooling, learning a new country and a new way of being and then moving again makes my brain mush. Writing that down makes me realise it’s a miracle I read anything last year. Here’s the books I read from September. List of the books of the year to follow…

I guess I haven’t learnt that yet- Shauna Niequist

This book felt like it saved me on some level. Shauna talks about the huge changes and transitions she experienced when moving from the place her family lived, where she had loads of networks of friendship and support, to New York. She and the family had to adjust to city living, new ways of being and new ways to find and live connection. Reading it came just at the right time as I remembered it’s ok to find this stuff hard, but that new life can come from such dramatic change. It felt like someone shining a torch along the way of change and showing me that hope is here. I’m grateful. Also the line of the title gave us a super helpful phrase for the boys as they started their new school in September, we said to each other A LOT. ‘I guess I haven’t learnt that yet’. Such a helpful phrase to take into situations we might feel lost and out of step in. All in all a super gentle wisdom wrapping itself around you in a warm hug of a book. 

The funny thing about Norman Foreman- Julietta Henderson

I wanted to really enjoy this but it took a while to plough through, which might be my state of mind reading it. It’s about a boy whose best friend dies. He then goes on a journey with his Mum to do a comedy gig at the Edinburgh festival, find his birth father and process grief along the way. It might be a good one but I struggled with it.

I may be wrong- Björn Natthiko Lindeblad

Bjorn was a Forest Monk for many years in Thailand and then came home to Sweden, got married and found out he had a terminal illness. He writes beautifully and each of these chapters feels like a slow dispenser of gentle wisdom. Worth getting your hands on and swimming in it’s delicate wonder. 

Bittersweet- Susan Cain

I really enjoyed this tour through melancholy and the more blue side of the feeling spectrum. She talks of the ache and longing in all of us for more, for beauty and for the source of that longing which can’t be found in many of the places we look for it. I loved this book and it helped me name my longings, look beyond my jealousy to what it tells me about what I desire. It also reminded me that I long for God and a world beyond this one, and that I’m not alone in that longing, it seems to be an incredible part of being human. I really recommend if you have any tendency towards the melancholic in your soul, Susan honours that feeling and explores what it leads to rather than trying to cure it.

The Island Home- Libby Page

I really enjoyed this super idealistic view of a remote Scottish Island and the tight knit community who live on it. We see it through the eyes of someone who left and now finds herself pulled back into it. It’s a pure escapism novel, resolution galore. However, having read I am an Island at the beginning of the year and seen another view of a remote Scottish Island I had to remind myself often that this was a novel to escape reality in, rather than one to reflect the more gritty nature of community life. 

Birdcage- Eve Chase

Really engaging story of three sisters with the same father but different mothers, the eclipse of the sun in ’99, the cornish coast and how we might move on from the past. Really good read. 

Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing- Matthew Perry

I just got this in before the chimes of the New Year. Friends I think is one of the biggest influences behind my desire to live closely with other people, sharing lives, hanging out at each others apartments and generally seeming not to do any work. It seems like an idylic life and when I rewatched it all this year I found myself (along with wincing and getting upset about the blatant sexism, body shaming and homophobia that 90s/00s TV thought was funny) wondering why they were all trying to escape their life and get into other relationships etc. I felt like shouting, ‘but you’ve got it so good, you are each others people and nothing seems to spoil that’. On reflection maybe I was just struggling with moving transition and trying to find my own people… 

Anyway. I was intrigued by Matthew Perry’s life. It’s a fairly heartbreaking tale of addiction, the oddness of having a lot of money and fame (turns out it doesn’t bring happiness, inner peace and a sense of living a good life… who knew…) and the desire of a man who wants to do good but who finds his addictions too hard to move through. At the end he seems in a pretty good place but after reading about so many of his set backs and ups and downs we are left wondering how long this will last. A fairly devastating read but I think important in understanding the complex nature of addiction and how hard it really is to be free.

Looking back over the years I seem to have had a varied response to advent. Some years I cannot wait, am super prepared and have picked out what reflections I shall enjoy in the season. Some years I have had to prepare sessions for others on advent and so I’ve got into the zone earlier, and some years I rush into the last few days of November frantically looking around to see where my advent love has hidden. 

This year is one of those years. I cried on Sunday morning when a friend texted saying ‘happy first Sunday of advent’. I felt jealous of her joy and yesterday I dug around into that jealousy and found grief over not being part of a Church community to travel this season with, over not having physical people and places to go to be reminded of the story which holds me to this earth. And at the bottom of that grief I found longing for this story, this one which breaks my heart with wonder every time I look at it again. 

This story of a God becoming human, an initiative taking love which came to hang out with us, feel our pain, be amongst us, not be separate from us, bringing the mysterious divine into earthy flesh and blood. To know what it is to walk around on this earth, to feel loneliness, grief, joy, friendship, wonder, tiredness and more. 

This story is why I can keep going, this story is what roots me, grounds me and wraps itself around the core of my soul. As it does so it reminds me of who I am, what I am doing here and breathes warmth into the cold. And that’s why I love advent. And that’s why I blog and post and seek the wonder, the joy and the ground beneath my feet. 

This year I think I’m going to go with this theme of ground beneath my feet. Life, as usual, is a full on rollercoaster of grief, joy, pain, wonder, sorrow, anticipation, possibility, isolation, loneliness and sitting around fires with friends. It’s a lot and I can feel my body grow tired of the tension of holding myself on this rollercoaster, leaning into bends, holding solid when the epic downs come and the stress of anticipating the leaps and bounds. 

Each day I want to get off, to allow my body to breathe, to find my feet on the ground, to remember the story which gives me strength to get back on and to find the bottom line of the love which holds me to this earth. I find it most in the child born to usher in hope and life, in the man who sacrifices wealth, power and position to talk to the outsider, in the one who lived through death and resurrection so we could too. 

What I’ll probably be posting is a whole load of pictures of my feet and some muddy leaves. But. It will be the reminder that this ground is here, the bedrock is solid, I can get off the rollercoaster and breathe each day and that is possible because of this season. Hello to advent, hello to the word become flesh, hello to the physical grounding of faith and hello to a God who knows what it’s like down here.