Reading · Field Notes by Elizabeth Wainwright

Thank you for reading Field Notes, which explores interdependence, human and non-human nature, history, inner life, poetry, creativity, spirituality, community, civic belonging, and the ways we make a life. This instalment is Fragments; a regular gathering of underlinings, links, and the things I’m turning over in my mind. I also write a longer form Village View instalment, roughly every two weeks.

Wishing you love, steadiness, courage, and light in 2026

Some Christians believe that the apocalypse will be an end — a clear before and after, a threshold between people and light and dark — and I have been thinking about this as life sits between the end of one year and the beginning of another. The calendar tells me that December 31st is an ending and January 1st a new place. It is a linear way of approaching time.

There is no fixed ending or beginning to natural cycles though — no apocalypse, only change. The days are now lengthening, buds will emerge and life will return to the land of the seeable, and then disappear into the unseen; days once again retreating into dark, then over and over again.

I am trying to remember these cycles as I gently put down annual hopes of new year endings and beginnings in myself, and instead inhabit this time as simply another place from which to keep taking steps, to keep metabolising the good and laying down what’s decayed, to keep being called into myself with no expectation of a final arrival point.

Endings and beginnings can come with more clarity than ongoing change though (and sometimes of course with sharp loss and grief too). A point after which things that once were, are now not. And things that were not, now are. This is what apocalypse means to some, and it can be a reason to not spend time resisting the breakdown of the natural world, or injustice, or suffering — it will all end and be replaced by something better at some future time, and it is all beyond our control.

This has always to me seemed different than what Jesus says: thy kingdom come, on earth as in heaven. And the kingdom of God is within you. And God so loved the world. This world, not some distant future spectacle. This world: loved, resurrected, not ended.

But whether the world or our own habits, perhaps it is clearer and less demanding to expect an ending and a clean beginning than a slow steady transformation in which we must participate to realise. Gradual change is hard, incremental, without clarity, with no triumphant arrival of a new thing; it says that the here and now is involved in the story of what’s becoming, and so requires our attention and care. There is no get out, no eject button, no escape, no apocalypse; only is and becoming and pay attention and participate.

It would feel satisfying to say goodbye to some things at midnight on 31st December — perhaps habits, or mindsets, or particular relationships, or entanglement with systems of oppression — and welcome in new versions of ourselves or the world. Goals, lists, resolutions, new notebooks — what joy and focus these tools can bring! And so can epiphanies, and breakthroughs, and revolutions too; speeding up transformation and bringing renewed hope. They are important. But I am trying to find peace with change not often coming clearly or swiftly or in line with the calendar or my own timeline.

I am trying to see new year as closer to the Greek meaning of the word apocalypse: not fiery ending, but an uncovering, a revealing. I want the new year — and really, every day — to be part of a gradual revelation, something I can keep up with at the speed and scale of a life, something that means I can approach my own becoming like buds on a tree do: responding to inner and outer cues with steadiness and grace; expecting not a sudden bloom but a slow sure emergence. This is I think how new versions of myself and the world will come: not by waiting for a clear end/beginning, but by loving and participating in and imagining from the given here and now.

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“I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticising, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me." — Anais Nin

“For last year's words belong to last year's language. And next year's words await another voice.” — T. S. Eliot

“Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need / For this bright morning dawning for you / The horizon leans forward / Offering you space to place new steps of change.” — Maya Angelou

Just one thing this time: one of my favourite poems I came across in 2025 — ‘Singularity’ by Marie Howe. Here’s what Maria Popova of The Marginalian (one of my favourite places to find insight and beauty) says about it:

“[the poem is a] meditation on the interconnectedness of belonging across space and time, across selves and species, across the myriad artificial unbelongings we have manufactured as we have drifted further and further from our elemental nature. Its closing line is an invocation, an incantation, ending with a timeless word of staggering resonance today: home.”

Singularity

by Marie Howe

(after Stephen Hawking)

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity

we once were?

so compact nobody

needed a bed, or food or money —

nobody hiding in the school bathroom

or home alone

pulling open the drawer

where the pills are kept.

For every atom belonging to me as good

Belongs to you. Remember?

There was no Nature. No

them. No tests

to determine if the elephant

grieves her calf or if

the coral reef feels pain. Trashed

oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;

would that we could wake up to what we were

— when we were ocean and before that

to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was

liquid and stars were space and space was not

at all — nothing

before we came to believe humans were so important

before this awful loneliness.

Can molecules recall it?

what once was? before anything happened?

No I, no We, no one. No was

No verb no noun

only a tiny tiny dot brimming with

is is is is is

All everything home

Fragments #5

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