I am slowly and somewhat reluctantly emerging from my cosy winter sleep and coming back to reality. I will sorely miss the sweet nothingness of Christmas holidays but if I stayed in that half-hibernated state for longer, I might not come back to life at all.
These past three days I have been wrestling with my school work. It’s tough. My brain is rusty, my academic muscles not exactly in a good shape. Plus the desperate loneliness of the process – and I don’t mean someone should hold my hand while I write my doctoral thesis, what I mean is that I have heard nothing – nichts, nada, ничего – from my supervisor for 2+ years. It’s difficult to motivate oneself, knowing that you are in the abysmal bottom of someone else’s to-do list. But onward I press and I am determined to turn in my next chapter on time (March 1st – say a prayer for me, phew!).
I'm writing a week’s worth of morning devotionals for the National Radio again. Recording on Friday morning. The post-Christmas rustiness of my brain isn’t exactly helping.
The school ought to resume next week but at this point, it’s not clear in what form. I am afraid I won’t physically see my pupils in a classroom for a while. But I try to stay calm as there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. And the fact that the first weeks of my lit class for the 5th graders are all about Astrid Lindgren makes me kind of giddy. : )
So to Zoomland I will move and on Zoomland I will stay. Next week the new semester starts in the Seminary, too, and my first homiletics classes are scheduled for Wednesday. As with my pupils, I’m saddened for not being able to see my students face-to-face but the joy of teaching homiletics again is overwheeeeeelmiiiiing! And I’m very much looking forward to my old lecturer’s habit of buying myself a box of favourite truffels (only take-away, of course, we’re in a half-hearted lockdown in Tallinn) after each lecture.
Oh, as it is the first post of a new year, I ought to talk about books. It was a good reading year, that wretched 2020. I managed to get through 42 books and as always, there were some real jewels among the less shiny stuff. So if I had to come up with the Top 5, it would look like this:
- Arabs by Tim Mackintosh-Smith
- The Oblique Place by Christina Söderbaum
- Flights by Olga Tokarczuk
- Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
- And everything and anything by my real literary love, Frederick Buechner (my notebook informs me I read 4 of his books last year)
The sweetest memory is from reading Arabs – the sweeping, 3000 year history of, well, Arabs. A. N. had advised me to read it as soon as it was published, and sure enough, it was just as brilliant as his other books. I happened to read it during the lockdown in March, and with its 650 pages it kind of felt like it would never end. And I loved the sense of reading it forever just as the lockdown seemed to drag on forever (which, of couse, it didn’t). I can’t stop marveling the talent of Mackintosh-Smith, if there was ever an X Factor for writers, he would surely win it. Because he’s got it all – he knows his subject thoroughly, he has this amazing ability to see connections where a mere mortal couldn’t, he uses beautiful language, and on top of everything else, he’s also so wonderfully witty! He's such a rock star of a writer!
So. That’s pretty much it. Happy new year, folk! It will not be an easy one but we’ll manage – I mean, we survived 2020!
Oh, just one more thing (sorry, my blog posts are getting so random). Today history was made in Georgia because Rev Rafael Warnock and Jon Ossoff were elected the new members of the US Senate and it feels like some light and dignity and sanity has returned to the world. Earlier today I read Rev Warnock's speech where he talks about his 82 year old mother who used to pick cotton as a teenager and who now sees her youngest son off to Washington DC as a senator. And I teared up properly because stuff like this makes you realise such a thing as redemptive history actually exists! What beauty!
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