Tea, A Drink with Jam & Bread

On beginning, remembering, and finding what works.

Update: I wrote post below earlier today, with the intention of sending it out this evening. I still plan to send it, but in light of the news unfolding in DC, the mundane suddenly feels lukewarm and a bit beside the point. I am nauseaous as I type. There might be more to be said, but for now, I am sitting in the grief of what America continues to reveal herself to be. For those of us who are Christians, I’ll offer a reminder that our spiritual identity asks us to yield. To surrender. To shun power and control. To seek humility. Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on us.

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It’s wild how you can wake up on an ordinary Wednesday and suddenly feel brand new. Hope stirs. The sky outside wears the color of dirty dishwater, last week’s snow slumps in slushy piles. But still, somehow, possibility thrums. It’s a good day for a walk! It’s a great day to hammer down and get stuff done! I think I’ll make a proper dinner for the second night in a row!

Friends, this was me this morning. All because my kids “went back” to school after Christmas break. It feels like the first day after a rager of a summer, except for the fact that they’re all still rattling around the house as we speak.

I keep telling myself I’ll stop mentioning pandemic-things. The day will come that this will be behind us, and won’t we be bored to tears by the endless references left on the record? Seems so.

Still, I find it impossible to write, think, or even exist outside the frame of this present reality which, like pressing on a bruise, has been politicized down to its grimy, microbial core.

I want the old Shannan back, the former Martin household that cleared out every day, a rhythm which bore the anticipation of weekend recovery and time together rather than the dread of a skipping record. I want to be the me who went places and who even, sometimes, exercised the luxury of bucking plans by choosing to stay home.

I want to eat in my friends’ homes and hug near-strangers at church. I want to make two pots of soup and invite them all over for lunch. I want to fall into bed at the end of a long day feeling the palpable solace of rest. (As opposed to the persistent, disorienting sense of, Wasn’t I just here?) I want to sleep well again. I want a day where death doesn’t feel like a neighbor I haven’t met yet.

That’s dramatic, I know. It’s also true.

And so, 2021 arrives (six days late) shimmering with a somewhat arbitrary sense of promise.

I grab it.

This morning I rolled out of bed earlier than necessary. The first thing I did was wash last night’s dishes while Ruby and Silas sat at the island eating their cereal. (A welcomed departure from two weeks of sleeping in and listening to the dumb laugh track of the tween Netflix shows they love.)

After they headed downstairs and up, respectively, to begin their day, I considered the one ahead of me. For the next several months, my job is wrangle words that feel just out of reach, pulling them down and arranging them in a way that will hopefully bring us closer to each other. Can stories lower the temperature of a culture on the verge of incineration? I don’t know, but today is a day for hope, remember? Maybe in another year’s time, we won’t be so quick to combust. Maybe we’ll all be a little less afraid.

It wasn’t long ago that I was spent my days in the garden, clipping the actual hope of glory and carrying it around by the fistful. Tomatoes grew like tiny suns on the vine. Relief arrived in wide circles of lawn chairs and bonfires after dark. Because I’m claiming January 6th as my personal New Year’s Day, I spent some time reflecting on things that will signal survival through the dark months, metaphorically speaking.

My word for 2021 is “Beginning.” In a year that disappeared into an existential, sludgy beige, I’m searching for moments that mark transition and move me forward. I’ve also been captivated by the story of Eden, our original beginning, with all if its catastrophy and compassion.

This year, I want Eden to be my teacher. I want to always be beginning.

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The kitchen is clean, the floor swept. I light the burner under my yellow teapot, scorched along the bottom from overuse. With time on my side, I’ve been brewing more loose-leaf tea. Seems fancier, somehow, a ritual previously reserved for weekends. (As I told Cory the other night, “When everything is rest, nothing is rest.) On this, the first day of the rest of my life, I tore the wrapper from a teabag and watched the leaves come back to life.

I made my toast on Kroger’s buttermilk bread, because there is simply no going back from its perfect chew. I smeared it with peanut butter and glazed it with the last bit of my mom’s homemade blackberry jam, cooked down from my dad’s berries, the ancestors of the ones that grew to the size of apricots in my own backyard, untroubled by political hacks and mask mandates, generous and belonging to everyone.

I doubt you could find a more pedestrian slice of toast. Some might find my version criminal. For me, it’s a signal of new mercies, a mini reset, crunchy and warm.

Over the weekend, my family wrote out goals and affirmation for the new year. One of mine was “Get dressed every day,” so I’ll do that next. I’ll don my noise-canceling headphones and do the work. I’ll take a walk. I’ll make this for dinner, with Silas, because his blooming fixation with the Legend-Teigens inspired him to thumb through Chrissy’s cookbook, and I’m guessing it was the closest thing he found to mac + cheese.

The world will spin. The last of the snow will melt. The towels will rumble in the dryer. These are the actual days, and they won’t be like this forever, so we might as well build the altar.

I am grateful for this house that seems too small as the people get bigger. I’m glad for the slowness, even as it shakes awake a new crop of anxieties. I’m holding the pain of our world, echoed in last night’s dinnertime prayer, “Be near the families of Jacob Blake and Breonna Taylor. Please, somehow, bring justice, as you promised.”

Gathered around a table strewn with artwork and a basket of oranges no one seems to want, we prayed quickly, imperfectly, for the fortitude to keep hacking away at oppression while we wait, and for John Mulaney (and countless personal friends) battling addiction.

Today, I add this: May we keep moving forward in faith. May we love and be loved, displaying our citizenship among the kingdom of God by putting others first.

May we get through it all, somehow, without wishing it away.

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One of my dearest friends, Emily P. Freeman, released a guided journal into our shell-shocked world this week. Though I have never considered myself a “journaler,” I’m already trying not to smother this one with too many expectations.

Emily speaks the language I love, of listening and looking behind in order to discern a clearer path forward. What do I want this season? What do I need? What do I dare to hope for? I scribble my answers, looking forward to spring, when I’ll look back and see how it all shook out. Spring, when the crocuses bloom.

Find The Next Right Thing Guided Journal by Emily P. Freeman here. (I’m using a Bookshop.org affiliate link as a tiny act of justice, but it’s available on all the big sites, too. It’s selling like hotcakes so it might be back-ordered, but worth the wait!)

If you chose a word for this year, I highly recommend having it stamped on a MudLove bracelet like mine. I wear one almost every day. They’re waterproof, handmade in Indiana, and each bracelet provides one week of clean water in the Central African Republic. Shop here and use the code SHANNAN2021 for free shipping. Bracelets are just $12 and they have mugs, too!

(My word for 2020 was “shelter” and I’m so sorry about that.)

To bring this Tea + Toast situation full circle, I was delighted to find toast as an unexpected culinary theme in the fantastic YA novel, What I Carry by Jennifer Longo. Toast aside, it’s one of the best representations of foster care and adoption I’ve seen in literature, telling the truth with spice and without apology.

“Adopted is a past-tense verb. Not an adjective…It’s an event that happens. Not who you are.”

“One walk outside and I am always home, beneath the same sky. Alone is not lonely.”

- From What I Carry by Jennifer Longo

:: These Peppery Pear Vanilla Scones aren’t exactly toast, but I’ve buckled them into my January recipe binder with high hopes.

:: After a decade of preferring Bigelow’s Earl Grey tea I discovered Twinnings’ version is a bit brighter, and more floral, in a good way. I’ll be rotating both options like the lowbrow tea-snob-wannabe I am.

:: (By the way, I was lovingly scolded by an Australian friend last week for drinking my tea black. Oops. This is why Americans shouldn’t be trusted with tea, but HALLELUJAH, won’t God do it!)

:: Lastly, Emily’s journal has a page for a favorite quote each month. (Sidenote: this journal is focused on seasons and months, rather than overwhelming us with pressure to journal daily. Love it.) Anyway, as someone obsessed with true and beautiful words but notoriously awful at documenting them in a way that leaves the possible for locating them in the future, I’ll at least be able to track down 12 this year!

I already jotted down my favorite quote for January, sent in a group chat by our friend, Jason. He’s a 5 on the Enneagram but this quote is one of the 8-iest things I’ve ever read and has me screaming in the bleachers:

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everyone goes, ‘Awww!’” - Jack Kerouac

Thank you for being with me on this path of discovering more of who we are. If you’d like to hear from me more often in 2021, join us over at the Secret Soup, where fun/surprises/nonsense/deep thoughts/behind-the-scenes/silliness await.

Looking forward to another year of beginning with you.

Love,

Shannan

ps - Top photo courtesy of Cory, because today, we’re all about reflection.