Learning to love January

Or, writing is attention is prayer is love

This month, I decided to work on learning how to love January. 

Yes, January.

So gray. So wet and cold. So long. So devoid of December’s charms that I feel the loss of said charms all the more than I otherwise might.

I didn’t adopt any kind of formal practice to do this.¹ I decided that I would simply pay closer attention to January, looking for things to love about it. I know how important paying attention is for writing, parenting, teaching, and learning of all kinds. Why should loving be any different? I thought.

Here are a few things I noticed:

candles at dinner

We start lighting candles² at dinner when we return to standard time in the fall. It’s easy to love the candles when the extra hour of darkness is new, but I think I might love them even more when the novelty of candle-lit dinners has worn off. By January striking the match feels like both ritual and exhalation, our way of letting the air out of the day.

snow days

Our January ice storm may have been the death of more than one of our plants, but there was something so delicious about the string of “snow” days we got, and the way they slowly unspooled. Each afternoon that we learned we’d be free from obligations the next day, we’d say, “Another Saturday night!” We got 7 Saturday nights in a row. In December, such disruption is sure to wreck happy plans or interfere with obligations, but not so in January, with its long calendar of empty boxes. January allowed us to do nothing but enjoy the unexpected, welcome interruption.

soup + bread

A good chicken soup³ is one of the easiest things in the world to make well, and it tastes so good in January. This month, I discovered that it’s just as easy to bake a great bread to eat with it, and that doing so is a lovely way to warm the kitchen on a cold day. I followed the recipe on the back of the King Arthur bread flour bag⁴, and I’m never going back to store-bought rustic loaves again. Mine don’t look very pretty—I don’t have the right size dutch oven to bake it in, so instead of getting a nice, round-topped loaf I get one that looks more like a moon crater—but kind-of-ugly tastes just as good as pretty.⁵

winter uniform (jeans + sweater or warm shirt + undershirt + boots)

I would a million times rather endure cold weather than hot. You can always put on more clothes, but you can’t go naked and, frankly, the body I’m now living in looks and feels better with more on it rather than less.⁶ This means I am more comfortable dressing in the winter than at any other time of year. I’ve never been fashionable, but I don’t want to be unfashionable, and January–the month when everyone is wearing warm clothes and sensible shoes, and few, if any, events require fancy dress–is the easiest month for me to reach my low sartorial goal.

spare beauty

January’s beauty comes from what remains after the things that are easy to love—soft petals, green green grass, blazing leaves—have passed. It’s in mosaics of branches, the sky’s cloudy canvas, the visual calm of a room absent its holiday finery. It’s a beauty that is found in emptiness, in the spaces between, in a month that is itself a space between.

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I could go on, but I hope a pattern is becoming clear. It’s the essence of January—its cold, gray monotony—that is essential to my ardor for what it contains. I light candles and eat soup and bake bread and wear jeans with sweaters and notice bare trees in other months of the year, but these simple, common things are transformed when they become part of January, when I see them in a way that, perhaps, they can only be seen in January.

As shared by

Jeannine Ouellette

, May Sarton, in her journal, quotes Simone Weil’s words, “Absolute attention is prayer.“⁷ Later in that entry, Sarton writes:

…if one looks long enough at almost anything, looks with absolute attention at a flower, a stone, the bark of a tree, grass, snow, a cloud, something like revelation takes place. Something is ‘given,’ and perhaps that something is always a reality outside the self. We are aware of God only when we cease to be aware of ourselves, not in the negative sense of denying the self, but in the sense of losing the self in admiration and joy.”

When I was a child, praying was a thing that befuddled me. As I understood it, praying wasn’t much different from wishing on blown dandelion seeds or writing a letter to Santa. Doing it felt much like whispering into a void. My inability to feel connection to God or anything else while “praying” was the beginning of the end of my faith.

In my month of using attention as a path to love, though, I absolutely had moments of losing myself in admiration and joy. They came through focusing on and seeing and feeling what was in front of me: the air pockets in a misshapen loaf of bread; the soft give of old, shapeless flannel; the patch of sky caught between bare branches; the ease of unstructured time. 

Call it attention, call it love, call it prayer: Aren’t they all the same thing? And does this mean that writing, too, can be a kind of prayer? Or, if not prayer itself, a conduit to it?

The words I shared above about the things I’ve loved this month are not first-draft words. They are the words I came to as I searched for the best ones to create the reality of my experience for others. As I paid more and better attention to my words—which led me to attend closely to the words of others, too—they took me more deeply into seeing and knowing the things I was using them to describe, more deeply into joy and appreciation, more deeply into love. Then they took me here, to this place of considering what prayer is or might be to an atheist like me, blowing open doors to my childhood and focusing the memories I could see through them. They took me to seeing in a deeper way than I previously had that writing and reading are and always have been my way of knowing realities outside myself, of losing myself in admiration and joy, even when writing and reading about things that have broken my spirit and heart.

All this because I decided to try loving something I’d once thought unlovable. Not sure if loving May or September would have brought me here, which is yet one more reason I’ve fallen so hard for January.

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As always, I’d love to discuss any of this with any of you reading. Let’s use the comments to talk about what January is or might be, or about paying attention, or praying, or writing, or baking, or getting older, or…you get the idea. Communion.

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If you like this post, please click on the heart ❤️ and/or share it. Doing those things will help put it in front of others who might like it. It also gives me encouragement to keep going. Think of it as throwing some metaphorical spare change into the hat of a street musician.

1. Gratitude practices have never done much for me, but my friend Kari’s recent post about hers is a great argument for trying it again.

2. Ikea’s inexpensive white tapers make it easy to light candles every night.

3. Ali Slagle’s chicken soup recipe is simple, easy, and easily modified.

4. This is not the recipe on the bag, but it looks even better and might just get me to a pretty loaf after all.

5. On the subject of bread and baking, I cannot wait to do a deep dive into

Chapin

‘s work on A Sourdough Story. Her writing, her story, (especially this one) has captivated me. Another discovery/gift that came with this January.

6. If you are coming to terms with a body that has changed or is changing, I cannot recommend more “Who Is that Old Woman in the Mirror?” by

Jody Day

. In a similar vein is “Stranger in the Mirror” from

Lyn Slater

, who, like me, has “a disinclination right now to put anything other than flannel shirts with no bra and old jeans on my body.”

7. “Absolute Attention is Prayer” Oullette’s Writing in the Dark is an amazing resource for writers, one of the few Substack newsletters that I pay for. I’m not sure if the essay I’m citing is behind a paywall (sorry!), but if writing is one of your creative pursuits and you want to get better at it, I encourage you to check out her work.