I don’t have a Christian faith and so advent doesn’t hold particular meaning for me, but I do enjoy paying respect to the rituals in our collective calendar, and becoming curious about how they can be joined and enacted in more secular ways. Advent is a reflective period of time, and tied to the idea of arrival. Of something coming, happening. While I could simply have written something every day for the next 25 days, I do this anyway. Letting the book set the theme means there will be a sense of moving towards something more specific. A narrowing of contemplative focus. When I think of the little windows on an advent calendar I think about the multiple apertures that reveal something more each time, until a whole picture is filled out. This is like reading. It is like writing. The calendar, the reading, the writing: the power of three that threads itself within the Christian practice also, and many other mystical traditions alike.