Author: Benjamin

The solstice has passed. It is winter.

Did you, as I recommended last week, put down your burdens, for even a moment? Did you allow yourself a little space to breathe, to step out of the freneticism that our culture demands this time of year, to give yourself some repose? Did you notice the quiet behind all our culture’s noise?

In these days just on this side of the solstice, our energy should be at its quietest. One energetic year has just ended, the new one has just been born. Now is a time for quiet contemplation. We might look closely at ourselves: Who have I been? Who am I? We can even begin to ask, without demanding an answer, Who am I going to be?

Already now the days are getting longer. A small part of us looks ahead, already, to spring. Soon enough it will be time for planting. What, then, should our work look like in this time of quiet? How do we meet this moment?

Hold on to the quiet as long as you are able. Soon, it will be time to pick things up again. What tools are we going to need to sow and cultivate springtime’s seeds? Take your tools. Replace the splintered handles. Sharpen the edges. Rest and prepare so that you are ready.

(Check out the rules here.)

Why only one piece?

I have insisted that what I’m doing here is not a blog, and I have never taken that back. But … I’m pretty sure a lot of what I’ve been doing over the past quarter has been blogging. I’m not going to post a definition of blogging for right now; we’re gonna leave that in the “You know it when you see it” category.

Trying to publish a “piece” every weekday has proven to be both too hard and too easy. I can always find something to say, and I have enough pride in my technique that I pretty much always do multiple drafts–I want to put a little music into everything I write, no matter how banal. But I’m also so wrapped up in the day-to-day of making sure I don’t miss a day of publishing that I’m keeping my gaze a little low, keeping my ambition too much in my pocket. I want to play a little more with what I can put up on a given day, to keep myself remembering that I am doing this for you, and also to keep myself in front of you, so you don’t forget. We’re here at Free Refills, all of us, to change the world. I’ve made that clear, right?

I also want my pieces to be better. So if I only write one piece a week, and everything else is & hellip; I don’t know what, simpler then I can make that piece a bit more kick ass. That’s the hypothesis, anyway. And Free Refills is supposed to be nothing if not a place for experimentation. I mean, we’re trying to change the world. We’ve got to take a few risks. But we also need to be honest with ourselves, to let go of the things that don’t seem to be paying out.

(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.

1. Any remaining idea that I need to figure out things about Free Refills ahead of time, rather than experimenting and seeing what happens.

2. The shame of 17 years without a job except writing. Why shame? By the standard measure of job, as opposed to, say, vocation—job meaning, “Can you self-sufficiently keep yourself alive in this world of ours?–I have been an abysmal failure. Which, okay, fine. But the shame serves me how?

3. This year I’ve experienced a lot of difficulties in a number of my close relationships. (Don’t worry: I can’t fail to note the common denominator.) I’d like to put down as much angst about those difficulties as I am possibly able.

4. Related to number three: Keeping silent about something when I should be speaking–even if there are unpleasant repercussions. (When it’s important that I speak, it costs far more to keep silent, irrespective of the repercussions.)

5. Related to numbers three and four: Any remaining idea that I have to be perfect.

6. Making things hard when they could be easy.

Today is the first day of my two-week winter solstice sabbatical. As such, this should properly be a short piece, don’t you think?

My theme for this year’s sabbatical period is putting things down. How many of the burdens that I usually demand myself to carry can I put down? How will that feel? And what can I learn from the experience?

(Hypothesis: I might learn that I don’t need to pick them up again. Or more accurately: I might begin to learn that when I set down a burden, whatever parts of it I later choose to pick back up have stopped being burdens.)

Energetically, the time approaching the winter solstice is a time of consolidation. It is a time of letting things come to rest. Nature around us has substantially gone dormant. While we as a species obviously do not hibernate, we too are meant to respect the energy of the season.

In our culture, divorced as it is from the natural cycles that feed our energy, we make no differentiation between the short, dark days of winter and the long, hot ones of summer. Yet our bodies know the difference, and cry out for us to acknowledge that difference, to respect it.

As we separate more and more from the natural energy of which we are a part, we become less and less grounded. Ungrounded energy tends to float upwards, coalescing in our heads, strengthening our sense of the reality of our thoughts and taking us away from the here and now. Thus the danger of becoming too ungrounded: it becomes easier and easier to believe our own bullshit.

We are carrying so much at a time when the energy of the world is requesting that we put things down. It can feel fraught, dangerous, to acquiesce to that request. Won’t we fall behind everything that is going on around us?

Honestly, there is a chance that we will. But I wish to pose to a question: at what point does the damage to your health become a cost too great to bear? Does that our culture all but demands of you to behave in an unhealthy way mean that you should do so? Or should you set up boundaries against it for your own well-being?

I urge you to choose the latter. What would it feel like to take just one of your burdens, set it down for a little while and breathe? (If necessary, you can always pick it up again.) This is the energy of the season. Even a few moments of repose, of connecting with the quiet flow of the season’s energy, can provide us with an important respite.

Give yourself that respite. In myriad ways, these are very challenging times. To deal with them effectively, we’re going to need to take care of ourselves. Who else will?

All that drafting, all that publishing: it has worked. I have a lot of material to show for it, both published and un-.

But now? There’s too much struggle in it, not enough ease, and too much of what I’m doing is for me rather than in service to others. The practice, as it’s currently defined, is no longer working.

Well, cool. We’re at the end of a season. Perfect time to make some changes.

Let me not denigrate the simple value of putting out work. In the Free Refills project so far, the person whose needs I primarily have been considering has been myself: I promised I would publish every weekday and doggone it, I have done exactly that.

Which is fantastic. My skill at taking the risk of getting things out there has improved dramatically over the last going-on-two-years, because there’s nothing that you practice dailyish for that length of time without seeing some improvement.

That I’ve given myself permission to not promote my work, indeed, have used that exact permission to allow myself to continue to explore the question of the work’s value in the work itself, may have served me until now. I hoped that iterating over and over again around this particular question would ultimately lead me directly to the answer, a hope that has proved, sadly, false.

My heart was very much in the right place. I resolutely did not let that I didn’t know what I was doing keep me from doing something. I give myself credit for that. But it’s time to let the world know what I’m doing, with the (somewhat frightening) understanding that the work I’m doing will have to change as a result. Whatever comfort zone I have established will shortly be disappearing.

We’re just about a week away from the end of Free Refills season seven. Seven quarters, now, of hitting my quota and putting up a piece every weekday. I’m proud of that. But in the course of asking myself the question, “Is this working?” I found myself asking a related question: “Who is it for?“

That question offered me the insight to see the limitations of my current approach. I get my drafting done. I put my pieces up. But what is the reason I do these things? I do them because I promised that I would. And to whom did I make those promises? Well, I made them to everyone. That’s why I mention them all the time.

But to what extent should you, the reader, even care? Well, to the extent that my example or my writing teaches you something, then I guess you might care. But otherwise, that I publish every day, or that I’m constantly drafting new material, probably interests you exactly to the extent that you care about me and want me to succeed. (And thank you for that; it means a lot.)

All that would suggest that, really, I made those promises to myself. You’ve heard me talk about them, and you’re rooting for me, but if I miss a day or a quota, it’s not going to affect your life much. It isn’t even likely to much affect your impression of me. “So he missed a day,” you’d probably say. “It’s hardly life-or-death.”

So let’s answer my thesis question: What I’ve been doing has been primarily for me. And up until now, that’s been fine. Over the past two years of the Free Refills project, I’ve proved a great deal to myself about myself. I’ve found new levels of dedication and strength. I’ve earned a quiet sense of pride about my work.

But if I want other people, especially people who don’t already know me, to give a shit about it, I need to do my work in service to other people. I need to offer of myself. This will, I’m sure, demand of me a new level of openness, of risk.

I’m ready.

The critical test of the potential relationship between what I’m writing here and actually making money from my writing rests on the question of, “Is what I’m publishing here actually valuable and important for readers?”

Let us first of all note that “valuable” and “important” are deeply subjective and highly dependent on the particular needs, sense of aesthetics, etc., of each specific reader.

So while it is not exactly for me to say what is valuable and what isn’t, I propose that my frequent digressions into issues like, well, exactly what I’m discussing here are likely to be valuable to exactly two kinds of people: people who are trying to explore how one might function as a writer in the modern world, i.e. ways that online publishing requests a different approach from us, both as writers and audience; and people who already care about me, i.e. close friends and family. That my audience seems to consist entirely of friends and family offers some evidentiary support for that above assertion, though in self-contradiction and self-defense I should also admit that I’ve done essentially no promotion at all of what I’ve written here beyond telling friends and family about it, which would tend to restrict the potential for growth into new audiences, particularly audiences who might be inclined to support my financial growth as a writer and artist.

But let’s be honest. A major reason I haven’t promoted what I’m publishing is my sense that by using the process of my practice to explore the utility to myself and to others of said practice, I might be kind of restricting the writing’s utility to anyone but, basically, myself. I’ve rejected “blogging,” as we usually understand the term, as pointless navel gazing, so I haven’t written blogposts. Instead, over the past going-on-two-years, I’ve written many pieces that are something like meta-blogposts, that is, pieces about the pieces themselves, which is sort of like the aforementioned navel starting to gaze in turn at its own navel. The potential audience for that kind of solipsistic exploration would seem to be exactly one (myself), at least until such time as Free Refills itself becomes self-aware, at which point this self-examination will doubtless strike it as useful to the extreme.

(I mean, imagine if someone were to hand you a Book of You, a written exploration of all that you are, have been, hope to achieve, etc., something very directly and personally to and for you, except written entirely by someone else without any participation on your part at all. After you got over the weird, Twilight Zone-type creepiness of the whole thing (e.g. “How did a book dedicated to me and yet written before I was even conscious know to offer such perfectly useful advice at exactly the moment in my life when I needed it the most?”), you’d probably be very appreciative. “What do I do in this situation?” you might ask yourself. “I know!” you’d say. “I’ll consult the manual.” And you’d pull out The Manual of Me.)

Free Refills might even some day thank me. But my readers? That is another thing entirely.