Set Your Face To The Wind

A personal post on why resolutions will get us through this one wild and precious life

I like New Year’s resolutions.

The word has, lately, found itself unfashionable. It has been switched out for intentions or something softer to spare, I suppose, the anticlimax and shame of failure. But I like its steely grit. It is a word that makes me think of a face hard-set into the wind as it climbs, slow stepped, up a mountain.

When I look it up I find it comes from the Latin ‘resolvere’. The prefix ‘re’ means ‘again’ or ‘back’; ‘solution’ comes from the Latin action noun ‘solutio’ which means ‘a loosening, solution’.

The idea that we will break, fail, fall is implied within the word itself. It’s part of our human condition. We will fail. We will get it wrong. We will break. But when we find ourselves loosened, we must get up and keep beginning again and again until we reach a solution. Reach resolution.

2024 has been hard (this is an understatement). It has shaken the core of who I am and where I am going. At times I have felt alternately like I am truly alive and that I am close to its opposite. I have set my face into the wind most days. Often it has felt like I have done so whilst small, hot missiles are thrown at my body as I try to keep moving.

Most of us are quietly carrying a cross of pain on our backs that few others can see. I used to be a criminal and family barrister and ten years in a courtroom taught me that, because of this, any judgement of others is probably best left to God and The Law. Only they have seen and heard all the different prisms of a story. This year I learned about choice, accountability, power and control and the parts we play in these interwoven links. Power is not inherent. We take power, or we give it up, but this means too that we can take it back. This is as true for our society and our democracy as it is for our relationships. It’s an idea I have thought a lot about this year; one I want to lean in to, on here and elsewhere.

Most of all I have learned that time keeps moving even when we want it to stop, and so must we. We wake up, breathe in and out, dress, eat, keep putting one foot forward and then another. We make our choices, then set our faces to the wind.

People have used New Year’s Eve as a chance for resolution for over 4,000 years. The Babylonians used a twelve day ceremony to mark the period as a time for reflection and renewal: the hope for something better. When Julius Caesar introduced the Roman calendar the first month of January was named after Janus, the God with two faces. One looked back at the year just gone; one looked forward at what lay ahead. In late medieval Britain people would give gifts called ‘hansells’ on New Year’s Day which were supposed to bring good luck and prosperity in the new year. The first written resolutions were found in the diary of the writer Anne Halkett, who wrote a list of pledges in her diary on the 2nd January in the 17th Century.

As a writer I guess I would say this, but writing resolutions down has always been an important part of new year’s eve for me. The act of putting ink on paper takes a thought and makes it real, letting its power loose into the world. Each new year’s eve I have done a kind of fire ceremony. Sometimes I’ve built an actual fire (sometimes I may have then danced around it). Other times I’ve used a candle on a tabletop. I write down all I want to leave behind, say it out loud, then put the paper in the fire, watching as the flame licks through the word until it turns to ash. Then I write down what I want to happen in the year ahead. I do not burn these words. I keep them safe. I don’t know whether this is manifesting in a Rhyonda Byrne sense, but I do think the act of doing this creates a kind of antennae. It is like surrounding yourself with static: like having inside you one of those globes where the electric current magnetises to your hand when you place it on the ball. You are more alive and awake to the opportunities, people, signs or words which align with your intention. And so they stick.

I didn’t do one last new year’s eve because I couldn’t see clearly what might lie ahead in 2024. It was the first time I can remember not doing so. So on winter solstice, which some believe to be the real start of the new year, I wrote down some words on paper with my friend Ollie. We said we would hold each other accountable for doing the actions and building the habits which would make them become true.

This new substack will be part of this. I hope what I write to you here about the stories of the people I meet and the things I see, read, hear and do will be interesting, useful and creative. I hope they ignite a spark and send you off in directions that enhance your life. But I, reader, am going to take something from you too. You are here to hold me accountable to what I have written below. Your expectation will mean I have to do it. If you like, I can do the same for you. Tell me your resolutions, your intentions, in the comments. Write them down. Commit to them in a public space. Then we can help each other make them true in 2025.

[NYE 2024: there was a fire; I may have danced around it, even in this outfit]

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Growth

For five years I have looked out of my kitchen at this garden.

Despite all I know about soil and growing food from all the farms I have visited, five years of managing an organic arable and pasture farm in Suffolk and a distinction in my post graduate degree in Agriculture from the Royal Agricultural University, I felt too overwhelmed and intimidated by it to create something from it by myself. I asked others to help. I looked up gardeners and designers. This is a picture I took of it in November.

I no longer have the means to get someone to create a garden for me. Nor, in truth, do I want to. I need more than ever to put my hands in the soil. To move my body in the cold and feel the ache of physical work. So I will begin to do this myself: grow an edible garden. The idea is daunting. I don’t know what I am doing. But I am going to do it anyway. I am writing it down here so you can ask me about its progress, and then I will have to see it through.

To help me (and, if you feel like joining me on a window box, balcony or corner of your own garden, then maybe you also…) I am reading these books:

‘Grow Easy’ by the brilliant Anna Greenland. Anna lives in Suffolk where she has built and transformed her house and garden into something that dreams are made of. She posts advice and skills on her instagram which takes cottage core to a new level. She has grown for Raymond Blanc, Tom Aikens and Jamie Oliver and was Head Gardener at Soho Farmhouse where she created the vegetable, fruit and herb gardens from scratch, which is quite a line up.

‘A Wilder Way: How Gardens Grow’ is Poppy Okotcha’s first book about how she transformed a garden in Devon. Alongside advice for growing and seasonal recipes she writes her personal story and shows how engaging with the natural world can both bring us joy and heal our minds and planet. It is published in April 2025. I am interviewing her about it for a FANE event at the Kiln theatre in Kilburn on the 23rd April. Come along! I’ll link the event when you can get tickets.

‘Compost’ by Charles Dowding. It starts with the soil. We all know that by now. My friend Charles Dowding’s new book is about how to use waste and turn it into compost gold. It is so good I gave it to my Dad for Christmas.

‘The Well Gardened Mind’ by Sue Stuart-Smith looks at the neuroscience and psychoanalysis that prove that working with nature through creating a garden can radically transforms us. Her book is a reminder of what we are learning about the magic and power of putting your hands in the soil. I heard Sue speak at a Historic Houses Association event in November 2023, alongside the lovely Marian Boswall, whose book ‘Sustainable Garden’ is beautiful and useful.

If you want to know more about the science behind the link between a connection with the natural world and a long, healthy life, I recommend Lucy Jones’ book ‘Losing Eden’ which is brilliant on all of it. I also found the Netflix series, ‘Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones’, fascinating. It looks at the places in the world - know as ‘Blue Zones’ - where a large number of the community live for a very long time, usually without degenerative diseases. Gardening, growing their own food and the particular bodily movement this requires, alongside a connection with nature is something they all have in common.

Wear

There is enough clothing in the world to dress everyone alive for a hundred years. If you want to get shocked into action, watch the documentary ‘Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy’ on Netflix about the waste of consumption to remind us all that when we put something in the bin, there is no such place as ‘away’. It all has to go somewhere and the cost to all of us is real and terrifying.

This year I resolve to buy no new-to-me clothing, for me or my kids. I will do a separate post with links to places I’ve discovered over the years and tips to find exactly what you’re after. I’ve also learned that going to charity shops in incredibly smart areas means you can snap up finds like a Herve Leger bandage dress for £60 (Hampstead High Street in North London, obviously).

[A Bella Freud 1970 sweater from Vinted (which coincidentally turned out to be from Emma Gannon…) and a vintage trench coat from Ebay.]

Stories

My writing has stalled this year. It has found its way out in poetry and unfinished short stories which no one is ever likely to read, but needed to be written because for a creative person ( maybe for every person), as the saying goes: the antidote to depression is expression.

This substack is a way to let me find my voice again after losing it a little. I am on the thirteenth draft (which tells its own story) of a difficult book I believe in, which brings together my old life at the law and my new life in farming and nature restoration, which now needs to be reformed. I hope this year will let me write that.

But as well as this, within this world and community I have built, filled with people in nature writing, farming, food and those committed to restoring our planet, I am brought into contact with so many extraordinary stories I have yet to share. This year I will find a space to tell those stories - whether through journalism, podcasts, on platforms, in speeches - or in here, to you.

[At 5am with writers’ block when writing my second book, Rooted. If nothing else to prove to myself that have done this before (twice) and I can do it again].

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In the past, those who could not afford a ‘hansell’ on New Year’s Eve would sometimes gift a poem instead. Here is an anonymous one from the fifteenth century to King James IV.

Jewels precious can I none find to sell

To send you, my sovereign, this New Year’s morrow,

Wherefore, for luck and good hansell,

My heart I send you.

My hansell to you, for 2025, is the same. Because if nothing else, last year did teach me a lot about love. So, friends, my heart I send you.

Maybe, one day, I will put some of the poems I have written on here. For now I go to Mary Oliver who wrote always about how to pay attention which is, as she says, the beginning of devotion.

Wild Geese | Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Here is a clip of Mary Oliver reading Wild Geece from the podcast ‘On Being’ that she did not long before she died with Krista Tippet. Which, in itself, is worth your time, especially if you can listen whilst looking out of a train window and thinking about what it is you are planning to do with your one wild and precious life.

2025 might be the year to find out.

Into the wind friends.

Happy New Year.

Sarah x