Fifteen lists in 2025. Ten overarching patterns + preoccupations:
- Anchor: Family as gravitational center.
- Spiritual + Contemplative Practice: Prayer + breathing with “(still)” as a kind of liturgical refrain. Stillness, silence, waiting, centering. Thich Nhat Hanh. Wisdom literature as a kind of aspiration.
- The Body as Vessel: Turmeric root, beets, tahini, buckwheat groats. Oatmeal (still, always). Eating as devotion, discipline. The simple pleasure of clothes that fit. Body as offering, as instrument.
- Music as Communion: An ongoing relationship with sound as sacrament (and sentimentality): Neutral Milk Hotel, Drive-By Truckers, REM, Minutemen. Music’s capacity for serendipity and affirmation.
- Creative Work + Vocation: Writing, reading, teaching. As celebrations, difficulties, callings.
- Coherence + Incoherence: The movement between order and disorder, between speaking and going nonverbal, between productivity and rest. Essential contradictions.
- Language Itself: Words: tome, flaneuring, fulcrum, susurration, mantra, exegesis. Brackets and em dashes. Pleasure in the texture and rhythm of sentences.
- Temporal Markers: Seasons, weather, time of day. Transitions, endings, beginnings. “Still” as both adverb and adjective — what persists, what remains quiet.
- Revelation: Noticing the noticing. The perfect Saturdays easily almost missed. Self as essential audience. The importance of showing the work.
- Place + Displacement: Alabama — the farmer’s market, Railroad Park, downtown BHM — and the omnipresent longing of elsewhere. Loose orbits. Place as provision.
Happy New Year, dear reader. Hope you find yourself surrounded by who and what you love the most right now.