(Happy solstice! It's the Free Refills New Year. That means new rules today. Check them out.)
Today marks two years since I started writing again for the Free Refills project. The rebirth, you might call it, as things got a little … quiet around here during about a year-and-a-half around the time of my father's active dying and death, and then a little dying and death and rebirth of my own.
One of the things that was meant to set the Free Refills project rebirth apart from the writing I had been doing--for I was always writing, always, I have notebooks full--is that everything I did here was meant, ultimately, for publication. Well, within the contours of a zero draft, anyway; the first rule of zero-drafting says that you can't do it wrong, which means that literally you can just bitch about how much you hate writing and it still counts. Obviously that stuff isn't exactly meant for publication.
Anyway, the idea was that everything was supposed to be for publication. But I found that there were a lot of things that I wasn't courageous enough to publish--including what I wrote on the winter solstice two years ago. Given my intent, isn't it interesting that even the very first thing I wrote under this rubric was something I deemed too out there to publish?
Let's change that. From my zero draft of 21 December 2015:
Happy winter solstice. The shortest day of the year. The moment of death--and with it begins the rebirth. So you can say, therefore: Happy New Year.
I sat on the cushion this morning and played with an energy technique I've been experimenting with. I was circulating energy from the earth up along my spine to the top of the head, then back down along the front of my body and back into the earth. Up on the inhale, down on the exhale. And once I was breathing freely and bringing the energy all the way up and all the way back down and feeling the energy, I began to charge up first one hand and then the other. Right, left, right, left. I was taking long breaths and so I was doing about three cycles of right-left on each inhale and about the same on each exhale, and as I did so the energy began to spiral around me, counterclockwise if seen from above.
Gee, I wonder why I might have deemed that a little out there to publish. But I can't help but wonder at the connection: it's two years later, and I'm still writing freely.