Tag: poetry

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My One Little Word for 2025

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It’s that time of year: time to choose a word as a beacon to guide me through 2025.

I chose the word listen as my One Little Word three years ago, and for the past two years I have chosen the word pray to guide me through the years. My former words won’t leave me – I still keep them as my own – especially pray. Once a new word has been chosen, former words don’t vanish, turning down some dark alley lurking between the minutes of the midnight hour of New Year’s Eve. They stick like blood kin that want more words to come to the table in the family of chosen words, much like siblings wanting more brothers and sisters.

I’m not abandoning listen or pray. But a strange word took hold of me a few weeks ago, and I don’t fully know why. It’s an adjective and adverb and, according to the dictionary, can also be used as a pronoun and is sometimes used interjectionally, too. This is not an actionable verb as my former words have been.

My One Little Word for 2025 shall be enough.

It seems an unusual choice to me right now, but I know it will become clear once the year gets going. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that once we pray for the right word, we must listen hard enough when it comes alongside us with the pick me! pick me! promptings.

I felt tears welling a couple of years ago when I discovered I was a one on the Enneagram – an overachieving perfectionist whose own worst enemy is…..well, …… ME. I can’t ever seem to live up to my own bar – it’s been set far too high for far too long. I often feel I fall short, even when I succeed. I need to be able to say that I am enough – – and to believe me when I do.

If I do a thing, I overdo it.
I cook for an army rather than for the two of us at the table. I own too many books and too many shoes. I need to learn to appreciate the blessings of having enough– without having too much. I need to find my library card more often than the Amazon cart. I need to learn what is enough and to be a good steward of the management of it.

My sense of adventure is insatiable. I want to explore every GPS location on the globe and don’t quite know what to do with myself when I get there, while under-appreciating that the exquisite beauty of my own town is a unique world all its own – enough to keep me fascinated right here where I am if I only see it with the wonder-filled eyes it deserves.

And my world gets out of whack. I work long hours, and I’m feeling my bones and my soul tell me that doing too much in one place leaves too little in another. More balance would bring enough to both the professional realm and the personal one. I’m often rushing my husband through the extra glass of iced tea he likes to have at the end of a meal if we are in a restaurant, even at times when we have no hurry or particular place to be. I envy his ability to amble where I can’t seem to slow down and fill my lungs with enough air to take the time to relax and breathe a little.

There are gestures where I fall short: phone calls, birthday cards, random text messages to say I love you to those who mean the world to me. I fail to do enough to let my family and friends know how frequently I think of them.

The first word that appealed to me for 2025 was less. I almost chose it – then, I realized that less may not always hit the marks I need to hit. I could eat less, I could weigh less, I could spend less. I could check a few boxes and say I did less. But the real challenge will be sorting what needs more and what needs less to find the just-right balance of enough.

If you have chosen a OLW, please share it in the comments. I love the stories of how words manifest themselves to the people they choose. This is the first word that has me scratching my head about its reasons for knocking at my door. But here we are.

Happy New Year, and happy word finding!

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Last-Minute Shopper

Photo by Andrey Grushnikov on Pexels.com


do not wait until

Christmas Eve to go gift shop

your mother was right~

your luck has run out

I planned and finished my list

and you had one job

she shakes a finger

from her buffet in Heaven

bites into dessert

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A Calm Christmas: Abundance

This December, I’m slowly making my way through Calm Christmas and a Happy New Year by Beth Kempton (2019), and in Chapter 1, Kempton presents The Five Stories of Christmas that focus on faith, magic, connection, abundance, and heritage. Today, my thoughts center on abundance.

Kempson inspires readers to reflect on this:

What elements of the more commercial side of Christmas do you recall from your childhood? Which aspects did you find exciting (such as a television ad, the idea of stockings bursting with gifts, writing a letter to Santa, etc?) How do you feel about Christmas shopping?

The first element of the commercial side of Christmas that I remember from childhood is the Sears Christmas Catalog Wish Book. I spent hours turning the pages of the toy section of the catalog as if those were the only toys in the world, all waiting on shelves at the North Pole to be delivered by a magical reindeer-pulled sleigh.

That wish book should not have been any different for me, really. My grandmother worked in downtown Waycross, Georgia in the Sears Catalog Department, so my entire childhood was filled with items from Sears – from housewares to clothing and everything in between. I had Winnie the Pooh on every shirt I owned, along with the matching shorts and pants, and I’m pretty sure that Sears short sets were the precursor to Garanimals. Whatever we may have needed, we mostly got it from Sears with the secret inherited family discount that all came down through Grandma Eunice.

Those catalogs weren’t just toy finders, either. They were the small-town Georgia equivalent of the New York City phonebooks used as booster seats for kids at Christmas dinner. It was the one time of the year we actually ate at the formal dining room table, and the catalog boost did the trick.

Shopping was an altogether different matter. My mother loved shopping at Lenox Square in Rich’s in Atlanta, Georgia the day afterThanksgiving. We spent all day there with my aunt, and it started at 6:00 a.m. to get the bargains, starting in Rich’s – before it became Macy’s. In fact, the men would drop off the ladies and the children and go back home to watch football and relax, but they would make a swoop back to the basement door of Rich’s by the candy counter so that the ladies could pack all the treasures in the car without having to lug so many bags. By the time the men returned, the women had fulfilled their part of the day with us cousins. We’d been through the Secret Santa gift shop with our own personal elf to help us shop with the money and list our mothers had made, and we’d also seen the pink pig. We got to go home and play board games when the men came back. It was the dads’ turn to be on kid duty. The women? They kept shopping – without kids in tow.

I’m pretty sure that’s where I developed my lingering distaste for shopping. I don’t like traffic, I abhor frenzied crowds, and I don’t like the “thrill” of the hunt. As an adult, I never have been one to have much more than what I need (except in food and shoes), so the excess of clearance and sale items in the name of saving money never made much sense to me about things we hadn’t needed in the first place. Were we really saving money if the need wasn’t there?

These experiences had a place, though, in shaping the shopper I am today. These days, I ask family members for the digital equivalent of the Sears Christmas Catalog Wish Book in the form of links. My daughter in law is amazing about it, too. She has the lists ready, one per grandchild, and it allows me to shop Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales as we purchase gifts for our grandchildren. We use this principle: Something you want, Something you need, Something to Wear, and Something to read. That’s how we buy for each grandchild (number 7 will be here 2 days after Christmas, if not before).

It’s what we call simple abundance: having the things we need, but leaving plenty enough wishing room.

On a scale of 1-10, I’d rate celebration of abundance by way of Christmas shopping and gifting as a 5 in importance. The ratings of each section will be used to create my Christmas constellation on Friday.