Coal from Santa
A quick story and then my 2025 plans for Learning, by Nature
Listen instead if you like:
Until yesterday, we hadn’t yet opened our presents because we were camping and it was a bit too much to manage all the holiday magic amidst a 10-day overland adventure that Eric had dreamed and drawn up traveling all over hither and yon in our Landcruiser to visit some remote (and beautiful) parts of Kenya. We still did stockings and decorated cookies and exchanged a few small presents, but we explained to Clara and Nora that Santa clearly couldn’t manage to travel to our campsite while visiting all of the children’s houses all over the world. Santa would, we suspected, visit our home while we were away and hopefully we would return to presents waiting under the tree.
Nora, for her part — ever pragmatic and also generally good natured (except when she is not-at-all good natured) — said,
Well, if Santa brings us coal, it’s ok, we can just make drawings with it.
From there ensued a conversation about how it “wouldn’t be as cool as a toy car with wheels,” but then, I took a page from Nora’s next-level lemonade-making and suggested maybe we could make it into a car at which point Nora replied that we could just “tie wheels on it.”
While tying on wheels seemed a bit impractical, particularly if we wanted them to roll, by the end of our riffing we had settled on a coal car that would draw as it drove.
This was a proud mama moment.
Words
When I was in high school and launched into storytelling mode, my close friends would sometimes hold up their fingers indicating how many times they had heard that story before. Thankfully it usually didn’t require two hands, and they almost always had a mirthful grin peeking through their digits along with some gentle eye rolling.
If it was just me and that friend, I’d (generally) stop. But if a new listener was nearby, I’d look at my friend apologetically, my question eyes not even halfheartedly seeking permission, and then I’d carry on with my story.
I started writing
partially because when we first moved to Kenya, I didn’t have a deep bench of buddies to talk with and I sometimes felt trapped by all my thoughts and words.It happened shortly after a fateful zoom call with some of the same close friends from high school who used the Beccastory finger count method – now decades-long friends. On that call, feeling the weight of 9000ish-mile loneliness and propelled by my loquacious exuberance, I dominated the airwaves (or whatever kind of waves are behind a video call…I refer you to the starting list of knowable things I don’t understand). I missed a social cue – or several – that I like to think I would have caught had we been together in real life, but nonetheless I had used up more than my fair share of our time together and my friends were frustrated. One offered some real-time-biting-but-not-wrong feedback about how I had monopolized the conversation.
It was like a punch delivered straight out of my laptop screen. I clammed up.
Afterwards, I reached out to her to debrief. We worked through it. Good friends are good friends because they tell you about the literal and metaphorical broccoli in your teeth, even when it’s hard to hear. And say.
I like to think my zoom behavior has improved. I’ve also asked one of these friends to send me a chat on the side if I’m out of line in the future. Safeguards.
Anyhow, as a silver-lining-kinda-gal cut from the same cloth as Santa’s-coal-for-drawing Nora, I’m glad this prompted me to start writing more. Even as my community of friends here in Kenya has grown, and even though I believe I was born an oral storyteller first, and even though I love talking and conversation, writing has been reliably cathartic. I’ve learned some things I am pretty sure I never would have figured out if I were only dealing in spoken words.
For me, writing is thinking. It forces introspection and discipline and reflection. It’s more deliberate and effortful. In writing, I try to draw my stories into sharper focus—to make connections and find meaning.
Publishing here (weekly for all of 2024!) helps me get out of my head.
I also hope that it’s less demanding of peeps on the “listening” end. Ultimately, reading (or listening to a recording of me reading) this Substack is your choice. And, you don’t have my expectant face right in front of you.
Ironically, many of my most well-worn stories I have not yet shared here. Perhaps it’s the weekly pace. Perhaps it’s because this has become a venue for processing and working through what’s on my mind right now.
Partially, though, I think it’s because I feel like some of those stories shouldn’t be committed to a page because that will freeze them and make them seem more definitive than they are. And I worry it might make them less magical and less personal. In oral storytelling, I play to the people with me and the uniqueness of the moment we are sharing. I am spontaneous. I emphasize points I think they want to hear. Or need to hear. I add specific details based on who is in the room – or around the campfire – or on the trail – or in the canoe. I am responsive. I improvise. It is a reciprocal, authentic exchange.
I don’t know how exactly to create that experience here.
And, still, I love words in all their forms. Spoken, yes. These out-loud words are my first and second and-too-many-to-count loves.
I also love listening to words. And reading words. And writing them. I love languages. And etymology.
Maybe my avoidance of sharing my most tried-and-true tales here is because in oral form, they seem to stand on their own, without me needing to make sense of them. And here I feel this compulsion to figure out what my stories mean. To make connections between one story and another. To tie them all back to nature-based learning, since that’s what I told you I was writing about. And to explain things – or myself – to you (whoever you are – Hi!) (Also, while I’m talking-writing directly to you, thank you for reading – I am grateful.)
And, as I write that “out loud,” I am struck by how much I disagree with the entire premise of what I’ve just said. Not the thank you part…the rest of it.
The best stories – written or spoken or danced or drawn (especially with coal from Santa!) – don’t explain (or Beccasplain). They are what they are – open for as many interpretations as there are readers and days and moods and sounds and weather and combinations and permutations therein.
In 2025, my plan is to keep writing here, albeit less frequently, starting with alternating weeks and then seeing how that’s going. Because I’m working on my book and need to make time to figure out what it is. I’ll still often write about human connections with more-than-human nature, but sometimes not. Maybe I’ll share some of my worn stories too, committing them to the page to make sense of them for myself. And have them be what they will be for you, wherever and however they find you.
Thanks again for reading. Wishing you health and time in nature in 2025.
❤️Becca
PS - I’d be really grateful if you would share my Substack with another potential reader.