This thing that I am building: It exists in vague blurs at the sides of my vision, and when I try to look directly at it it dissolves into mist. In its ghost-like nature, there is a message: this will not be something you can control. You can only do the work. It is constructing itself as you go, and you won't see it clearly until it is complete.
Something comes into focus: This is the next piece, it tells me. I can hold it in my hands, turn it over and over, examine it as much as I want, but putting it into the whole offers me no further clarity except, This is the next piece. So it was with daily publishing and This Is Not a Blog and even the transcendent importance of Free Refills, which I haven't yet told you about, but will.
All I know about helping this thing that I am building come into being is to continue doing the work, and to give honor to the work by allowing it to evolve and trusting the evolution. It is not something I can control and it will therefore never be comfortable, not until it is completed, at which point the next project will begin, and the process will continue.
Things which are solid: I see that I will have to dive into the design of the site itself. This is not a skillset I have, and the smart thing would be to hire someone, but how do you communicate what you want when when you don't yourself know? This is not a blog, but it looks like one, and not a particularly loved one at that. Ultimately it must not and will not look like one. The discovery of how it should look is deeply entwined with what it is.
Control: All you can control is meeting the practice, but that isn't where the edge is. Everything interesting happens in the space beyond your current understanding, where your mind has to relinquish its ability to figure things out, and let the flow carry things forward, as it always will.
Remember this? Build it and they will come. That sentence and the weight of meaning it carries now transcends the initial artistic expressions that brought it to us. It evokes a certain magic, a certain wonder. It demands the question, What is it?
What, indeed.