To Practice

It's nearly a new year for me.

January has never really worked as a starting point; I'm too much acclimated to an academic calendar.  Late August/early September have always inspired me to set goals, outline plans, organize my life for the year to come.

So here we are, at the start of a (almost--I've still got two weeks, techincally) new year, and I've been reminded of the principle of practice.

Too often my goals, plans, and organization for the new year are lofty and easily abandoned.  But as I just finished reading Barbara Brown Taylor's An Altar in the World and its reflections on spiritual practices and as the sermon yesterday morning cited Wendell Berry's "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front," which concludes with the instruction to "Practice resurrection," one of the goals I'm setting is to practice.

Practice what?

This morning, after I adjusted my thinking to include a trip to the gym (thank you, Dear Husband, for putting it in your schedule so I was challenged to put it in mine), I thought perhaps my own goal could be "Practice incarnation."

I've had a good weekend to use as a starting point for this.  We gathered vegetables and apples (hooray!  Apples!) at the farmer's market and bread at the bakery.  I moved the dust off of the bookshelves, sorted out the toddler's toybaskets, and cooked.  (Oh how happy I am to have a case of New Mexican green chile to roast, peel, and freeze for the year ahead.)  I ate a lovely quiche at a new-to-me bakery I've been meaning to get to for nearly four years.  I had dinner on some friends' deck and watched the toddlers jump up and down in their bouncy patio chairs, and I managed to be the (somewhat) stern mama and not laugh out loud.  I drank wine and ate ice cream.  And I sweated at the gym this morning, trying to quietly pay attention to the strength (and limitation) of my own body.

Even as I make this list, I also recall the moments I spend in my own head--waking up to worries about lists and too-short time and obligations that largely exist because I invented them.  So I hope that this reminder will call me back to practice incarnation.  To practice living in my own body, sustaining it with good food, exercise, laughter, hard work, and rest.  To practice the work of the mind that can be energizing and challenging.  And to set aside the abstracting ideas that call me away from who--and where--I am.

Even though this blog is a kind of abstraction, it's already helping me to practice.  To think about incarnation (and, therefore, resurrection--which is its theological corollary, as far as I'm concerned) in a disciplined way.  Not to perfect this, by any means.  But to practice.