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Can I be honest? Last year was not my favorite. I’m not one to believe that January 1 is some magical day where everything resets, but there is something really beautiful about new beginnings. About being able to leave a hard year in the past.

A week ago, on the first day of 2023, I pulled a long-neglected jar of sourdough starter out of the fridge. If you’ve ever dealt with sourdough, you know that old starter is somewhat frightening. It develops a layer of “hooch” on the top, a dark liquid that floats on top of the thickened starter. It smells strong, but not unpleasant. I dipped my bread dough whisk into the jar, and stirred the gluey, gray mixture. I have faith that it isn’t ruined. That after a few days of patient feeding, it will come back to life. Bubbly and resembling an actual ingredient, not some weird gloopy mess.

The first loaf I made wasn’t perfect. My technique was a little clumsy, and my impatience led to an inch of doughy bread at the bottom of each piece. But enough salted butter and you could barely notice.

Tonight, I started my second batch. This time the starter woke up much quicker. It remembered its job. I tried a new recipe tonight that requires me to gently fold the dough in on itself every 30 minutes. The first time, my hand was covered in dough, sticky and messy. But each subsequent fold it becomes firmer. It begins to feel right, somehow.

After the last fold, I will cover the dough for the night. While I sleep, it will rise. I hope. Because bread requires a measure of hope. Faith in the starter that just a few weeks ago looked like a forgotten science experiment in my refrigerator.

In the morning, I will fold and divide and let it rise again. And finally, hours and hours after I started this process I will pull out a fresh loaf of sourdough bread. Mike will toast me pieces and bring them with my morning coffee. I will eat rushed sandwiches on it in-between meetings. I will spread peanut butter on it and eat it as an open-faced snack while I prepare dinner.

Tonight, as I stirred and folded and waited, I began to think about how this could be the year of sourdough. A year of trusting the process, even when it seems messy and broken. A year of slowing down, knowing that some things can only be accomplished through time and patience.

Perhaps most importantly, may 2023 be a year of enjoying the simple things. Of tangy sourdough starter. A dish of softened butter. A slice of perfectly toasted bread alongside a warm cup of coffee.

What is your 2023 a year of?

Twenty months ago, I bought a violet to mark the first month of our adoption journey. And what a journey it has been. There have been thoughtful plants that I have poured over in the aisles of our local garden store. One that we bought in California and brought inside hotels to keep it warm on our 20+ hour road trip. We have two plants gifted to us from clippings, and I carefully monitored them, breathless, until they produced new buds. We have plants that have been gifted to us, fancy plants and grocery store plants.

But then, there are the ones that haven’t survived. That very first violet died tragically, snapped off at its fragile neck while I pruned it. A few had beautiful flowers but then never grew again. Right now, there are no less than three plants that look limp and yellow and scraggly.

We stopped buying plants when we got matched. And when our adoption was disrupted, I consciously decided not to start again. Aside from a lovely plant left on the front porch by friends, I just couldn’t add to our menagerie.

The plants were supposed to represent growth in the waiting. But now, where our hope had once flourished, it just felt dry and rootless.

That’s why I was so surprised on Saturday when I looked at Mike and said “I think we need to buy a plant.”

I can’t explain what prompted it, but I felt like we needed to bring something living into our home. Something that reminded us what it felt like all those months ago.

We roamed the aisle of our favorite garden store, and there we spotted a plant unlike any I had ever seen. It was a strange mix of flowers and spindly branches. It wasn’t pretty or neatly shaped. In a word, it felt wild.

I quickly looked it up on my phone to make sure it wasn’t too finicky, and I saw, in bold letters, TOXIC. And I laughed out loud.

In my hands, I held a plant that was both wild and dangerous. It was perfect. Because right now, as we grieve the loss of an adoption, as we try to keep moving forward, hope feels wild and dangerous.

Wild and dangerous. It’s interesting to me that those two words can be used to describe something exhilarating as well as something excruciating. Skydiving is wild and dangerous. But so is a car spinning on the ice. Traveling to an exotic land is wild and dangerous. As is a bear stumbling onto a trail near a group of hikers.

Twenty months ago, hope felt exhilarating. Getting a match was scary in the best possible way. But when the bottom fell out, exhilaration turned into a terrifying free fall. Scary turned into crushed.

But that plant, with its sinewy arms and its delicate flowers is a symbol that we are clinging to hope. A hope that leaves us exposed and vulnerable. That feels toxic and untamed. When I look at our new plant, I feel a tightness in my chest. Roots wrapped around a tender spot.

Protecting. Growing. Wild. Dangerous.

I was baking a coffee cake when we got the call. Pillowy cake studded with tart pockets of rhubarb, showered in a gingery crumble that was warm in your mouth even if the cake was cold. I was baking it on Thursday, in preparation for Easter. We were supposed to leave the next morning to meet the birth mother who was scheduled to give birth in just a few weeks to the child we were planning to adopt.

When the phone rang, I answered it carefully, my hands sticky with rhubarb.

It was the news that every person on an adoption journey dreads. She had changed her mind. The baby that had always been hers would now forever be hers. And we were left with dreams shattered and coffee cake crumbs covering the counter.

It was over a week ago, but the memories from the days that followed are still vivid. Last night as I lay in bed, the grief softened but still very much there, I was struck by how those days have a literal taste to them.

Thursday, mere hours after the news, milkshakes showed up on our doorstep, delivered by a sweet friend. We cried and drank them, the thick, cold pushing past the hardness in our throats.

Later that evening, our church showed up, knelt in front of us and handed us bread and wine. The body and the blood. I wept and chewed — bread with an edge of bitterness from the cloves and molasses, wine sweet and biting.

Over the next few days, friends brought take out and soup and sandwiches — warm and nourishing things that we ate nestled next to each other on the couch. They also dropped off brownies and cookies and ice cream, sweet to counter the sharp.

On Sunday, we hosted Easter brunch, desperate to feel normal for a few hours. The coffee cake made its appearance. I expected to be able to taste sadness in it, but it was, in fact, delicious. The day also tasted of burnt bacon, grief clouding my mind, forgetting to set the timer. It tasted of good coffee and steak smoky from the grill. Of salty tears when I snuck off to the bedroom to cry and breathe deeply.

The following week friends continued to nourish us. Cuban black bean soup, whispered prayers, burrito bowls, long hugs, fresh bread and reminders we are not alone.

This morning I woke up thinking, we made it another week. It has been 12 days since that phone call. And the remnants of our grief and the boundless love we have received are everywhere. A full refrigerator. A closed nursery door. Flowers and phone calls and late night tears.

We are loved. We are shattered. We are.

There’s a phenomenon in our home that we like to call “chopping down a tree on the back forty.” I can’t even remember where we stumbled upon it, surely on some clever person’s social media. But the idea is, when you are having a big party, with tons of people coming over to your house, and your husband disappears for the day to cut down a tree on the back forty — the part of your land that nobody would ever see.

In real world terms, it’s vacuuming our your car before the party starts. Or organizing the garage. Or vacuuming the storage room. Or any list of things that nobody would ever see or consider. I also like to call it “procrastiductivity” — a time of hyper productivity when deep down you’re really procrastinating as hard as humanly possible.

Friends, the last two months of my life I have been chopping down trees on the back forty.

As many of you know, Mike and I were matched for our adoption recently. We are holding the details of that match closely, pondering them in our hearts until the time comes to share. And as we are preparing for a child to enter our home, it looks like I am being super productive. This many Amazon packages haven’t landed on our porch since we were wedding planning! All day, I read articles and compile lists and ask questions and do research. I am productive with a capital P!

But I am also procrastinating with a capital P. Just yesterday, as I was putting away some groceries, I thought, “I have to reorganize our pantry before the baby!”

Please know, I understand that our baby could not care less if our pantry is organized. Our friends will not peek into our pantry to judge us. But that pantry is my tree on the back forty.

My heart feels bruised. My emotions are in a constant state of whiplash. But I can control my pantry. I can neatly line up my oils and vinegars. Meticulously organize my seven kinds of flour (I promise, not an exaggeration). Every thing in its place as life itself feels out of place.

There’s grace on the back forty though. There’s peace in the pantry that I can’t find in the nursery right now. And that’s okay. Clearing the back forty gives us a place to breathe and cry and laugh and hope. When I feel myself going there, hiding in the wild woods, I must remind myself to lay down my chainsaw and rest. To wipe down my pantry shelves and breathe.

To put aside both productivity and procratination and just BE.