No.273

Ella Frances Sanders

Dec 31, 2025

December ending, year ending, a list, featuring four as-of-yet-unseen paintings from my upcoming and sixth book:

Not possible I think to fully decide whether it is an additional softness or an additional hardness that coats people at this time of a year—confusing that it isn’t easy to discern, so perhaps it’s some of both, but there is certainly an exhaustion visible, a type of vulnerability or brittleness also, and probably many of our bodies are just very tired of being things
For the past few nights I’ve fallen asleep while wondering why sleep is referred to as something we fall to, or drop off to—presumably because of that moment halfway between awake and dreaming which feels like an edge, or a void, or a rug being pulled out from under you
In how many other languages is sleep referred to as something you fall to?
Whenever the subject of sleep comes up you will say how it usually takes you several hours to fall there
If you want to reveal to what extent somebody knows the rooms of their home you can ask which unfathomable corners are the ones which have always, and will always, collect inexplicable dust—because it is never all corners, and the movement patterns of occupants often encourage dusts and fluffs into peculiar yet specific places
Sometimes, as with clothing, you’ll find your feelings don’t fit you properly
I said in conversation to a friend this morning that it isn’t possible to miss people quickly but in fact you need to miss people slowly, and this feels true
Right now the garden feels so empty of everything and this feels me with perhaps a type of panic
I’ve noted two things which often come after the word ‘impending’ are doom and parenthood
Tonight it will be -3°C (26 Fahrenheit) and this means a) there are three woollen layers on top of the bed, b) that I think a lot about deforestation because the woodburner is on most of the time, c) the landscapes around me feel correct in that they have evolved to look beautiful during winter freezing
I received the advance copy of my sixth book and then for the first night together slept with it underneath my pillow it just seemed like the thing to do

*From the chapter ‘Seasons’ in* Words to Love a Planet *(Andrews McMeel, 2026)*

The above painting is from this new book, Words to Love a Planet, which will be released in the UK on March 26th and in the US on April 7th, and if you’re anything like me, slightly like me, or even nothing like me at all, it surely won’t have been lost on you that we urgently need more words we can love the planet with and I’ve worked somewhat deliriously for three years to gather over two hundred of them in one illustrated place so that you might be able to spend some of your own precious Earth-time reading about these words, feeling them, living them, and to this end you can find pre-order links at the end of this longest ever list
Pre-orders are now brandished about as the be-all and end-all of book sales i.e. a lot of publicity effort or non-effort is supposedly decided based on how much a title is ordered in advance of its on-sale date—I am acutely horrible at engaging with such numbers but I’ll include that apparent fact so you can make an informed choice
While attempting to excavate an old and diameter-of-enormous tree stump you also dug up countless bulbs of varying sizes which were starting to grow themselves up towards the light and so I replanted them throughout the grass and crossed fingers
I thought they were coming, the snowdrops and bluebells and who knows what else were already working their way towards us and I suppose the same could be said of all the things that will ever happen in our fractional lifetimes

*From the chapter ‘Weather’ in* Words to Love a Planet *(Andrews McMeel, 2026)*

It seems incredible that not every single song ever sung is saying the same exact thing, or maybe they are
A year will, if left to its natural devices, contain both the delightful and the diabolical, frequently in one fell swoop
That is actually a nice thing about the English language courtesy of (most probably) Macbeth, the notion of fell swoops
It’s more difficult than you’d think to make eye contact with birds
What most people don’t seem to realise is that AI bots, as you succinctly put it the other week ‘do nothing but piece together somewhat relevant phrases based on statistical likelihoods’ and therefore could be renamed as ‘slightly-less-than-random phrase generators’ / See also: I will always completely ignore the ‘AI Summary’ now aggresively thrown at us when Googling this or that
It is not how I wish to live my smallest of moments on the surface of the planet, devoid of good-humoured-ill-humoured context and nuance and human wavering and the poetry which arises from your exact arrangement of cells experiencing and accumulating their aliveness
A large amount of what society has deemed Good and Important and Worthy is actually Noisy and Unhelpful and Actively Damanging but I don’t always know what to do about this
The perpetual and mystifying ability to drink an entire mug of tea and have zero recollection of doing so?

*From the chapter ‘Land’ in* Words to Love a Planet *(Andrews McMeel, 2026)*

Yes, you can only live in your body, no one else’s, but that doesn’t mean you can disregard or disconnect from the realities of others or cease to try and make them more bearable
‘Immature people crave and demand moral certainty: This is bad, this is good.’ — Ursula K. Le Guin just knew all the things, and the 2004 speech this sentence is taken from can be read in full, which I recommend if only because it begins with ‘It seems very strange to me to fly 4,000 miles to speak for ten minutes at breakfast. To me, breakfast is when you don’t speak.’
Do we speak at breakfast? What gets lost in the gap between us if we don’t speak at breakfast, but also what gets lost if we do?
The poem by Anne Boyer titled ‘What Resembles the Grave but Isn’t”:

Every single person is in some way ridiculous and if you realise this sooner rather than later you’ll have an easier time of it
You brought home a panettone pistacchio from work and said ‘We will share it tomorrow!’ so then it sat waiting on the coffee table within its charming green tin as we existed together in evening dark
Might there be a correlation between cold hands and sadness
Might there be a correlation between sadness and purchasing new pens
Earlier today I was lying flat out on the living room floor with my head approximately one foot from the woodburner and after a time the absurd heat that issued and concentrated on my forehead felt oddly like a hand being gently pressed there, and this reminded me of the few, irreplaceable times my grandfather held a hand to my pained child head as if to draw the headache out from my brain and into his understanding arm
I wanted you to have a long list to end the year with, to read all at once or in pieces or later, to sit on like an egg, to share with a person you already care about, to share with a person you want to care about more, to keep for yourself, to help carry you into a month called January holding in its wings who knows what, to nudge or nod or hold onto, and because things end all the time but because they also begin