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New year, new song

new reflections on how to keep beginning as the world keeps spinning towards apocalypse

Hello, my friends. Happy New Year. It’s been a while. Too long, really. I’ve been working hard, writing a lot, but struggling to put anything in a finished-enough form to bring to you. It’s not as much perfectionism as it is a desire to move slowly - to find a manageable, sustainable pace at which to work. I’m also still feeling out exactly what I want this space to be - what belongs here, what doesn’t. What’s the best way for me to share my process with you? Where is the line between showing you my work product and sending you gratuitous junk? (For the record, that’s a line I never, ever want to cross!) Thank you for staying with me as I figure this out. I am hopeful that 2023 will be a year of building real community here - a year full of questions and growth.

For now I want to share with you a draft of a song I’ve been picking at for the last few months. I seem to be fixated on the theme of apocalypse lately. That sounds so ominous, and sometimes it feels that way, but what I’m really trying to do with these ruminations is dig up the silver lining and hold it close. We conquer fear by facing it. We master death by embracing it. Of all the ways the world could end, I want to choose the one in which life holds all its fullness and joy until the last possible second. I don’t think this is accomplished with wishful thinking or by telling ourselves beautiful lies. I think it demands of us a full-on reckoning with truth of who we are in the context of the world we live in.

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Authors
Jessica Smucker