Category: Uncategorized (So Far)

The bulk of my drafting so far this year has been trying to find my way into best telling the story of the early work Jerry and I did together. I don’t feel like I’ve quite hit my stride so far, but there have been a few bits and pieces that I’ve really been proud of. For example:

I had the depression to teach me that in order to be living in the way I was living, I had had to send my energy very far away for a very long time, in order to not just kind of naturally find a way to shine.

Despite using “in order to” twice in that sentence–all hail the zero draft, in which it remains impossible to make a mistake–that sentence sizzled when it came out of my fingers.

So how might I do this period of the year better, next time around? Not quite twelve months from now, the holidays will arrive again, and there will be a million things, because that is the way the world in which I live works. But there will also be the strong energetic pull to slow down, to slow down, to slow down, which is the way the world on which I live works, and that world is the far deeper, more profound of the two.

The tension between the two is the main stress of the holidays, and I don’t want to live that way anymore. I want to experience the shift in seasons and the parts of our culture that dance around it (no matter how inelegantly, sometimes) as an experience of joy. It will be even more important next year, because there is the strongest chance that next year my holidays will look far different from how I’ve ever experienced them before.

I will not be juggling deadlines during this period next year. My writing and my work will be quite different then. Next year, as I enter the time when my body is really trying to slow down, I will make sure that there be nothing related to my work, literally nothing, that will demand my daily attention. I will have finished with that part of my year. I wish to meet those days next year in joyful immediacy, so that they enliven rather than drain me.

There will be social demands, and I will meet them. Some invites I will jump on. Others I will smilingly decline.

Gift-giving is a yearly stress for me. I butt up right against the deadline every year, for I have to this point lacked the easy imagination of the natural gift-giver. But 2018 will be different. With a little luck and a lot of hard work–hard work which has, I assure you, already begun–my relationship with abundance and thus my ability to give from center will radically change.

What you are reading here exists in resonance with the rest and rebirth of winter. It resonates with rest because it is a call to rest, a recognition of a failure of sorts at the end of 2017. It resonates with rebirth because I am describing a vision for a different me.

Here he comes.

How can I be so sure of his arrival? Because I look back twelve months ago and shake my head in marvel at all that’s changed.

That change is only accelerating.

I had been scrambling that week to finish my writing for the year, to be able to enter into that weekend with everything done, to get to experience it joyfully as the first days of my sabbatical. I had other things to attend to, but because of how I have built my writing up in my world, it felt like the most important thing. I do not fuck up meeting the demands of my writing. And so everything else I put aside.

I have built the writing to be the thing that has to get done first, always. Everything else has to wait. And this is powerful and lovely, this dedication, and from the vantage of today, I admire the ferocity of my devotion. I wield it like a sword.

But I have bigger tasks now, and I discover that this all-else-be-put-aside dedication no longer serves me. I have proved to myself and everyone, beyond every shadow of every doubt, that I am capable of the demands of this devotion. Now it is time to show myself and everyone, beyond every shadow of every doubt, that I am finally ready to welcome the so-much-more that I and they have for so long seen within me, crying to get out.

Before bed, in the dark of night, I realized I was again ignoring my own teachings, and the stress I was feeling was proof. It was a week before the solstice, and energetically I was supposed to be slowing down, but I was not slowing down. Of course there was the hot buzzing feeling of intense stress in my body. Of course there was. How could it be otherwise?

There were things to be done. I had Christmas shopping to do, and it was eleven days until Christmas, and as is true almost all of the time, I had few ideas for gifts, imagination for gifting not being one of my strengths.

What else? Later that day, I was to go away for the first part of the weekend, and with a good-sized group, and there was a lot of freneticism in that planning, and that freneticism demanded my attention and energy. At the end of our time away, we would all rush back to Denver in order to go to a party. It would probably be a fun party, but it would be a highly social experience immediately after a few days of highly social experience. And then a few days later, there would be holiday travel, and then the holidays themselves, and then five straight days of work on the mountain, and then the excitement of New Year’s Eve, and then I would have friends visiting. Everything I just described was intended to be experienced as joyful, and much of it I experienced joyfully, but all of this came at a time when my body was asking me as best it could to slow the fuck down.

I had gone to bed a bit before midnight. I awoke later and recognized I was awake. Consciousness welled up, and I was a long way from returning to sleep. I thought about the feeling of the night’s quiet, the particular weight of the darkness. Was it more likely 3:30 or 4:30 a.m.? The latter would be just fine–I know this amount of sleep, and know that it is enough to sustain me. I massaged the feeling of the dark, rubbed it. It felt like 3:30. I turned and looked at the clock and the clock proved me right. 3:28 a.m.

Three-and-a-half hours of sleep is a scary number for me. I know I won’t be at my best when the morning’s light dawns. I will make mistakes that I wouldn’t otherwise. I can function, for I feel the fear of lack of sleep in a far different way from long-ago me who suffered so, but the fear is there, and it is partly justified.

I knew the waking was likely when I went to bed. The night had that feeling. When I went to sleep, I could feel that sense of far too much to do and far too little time to do it in. I knew, but am so far powerless to prevent, that the expectation of wakefulness might lead to wakefulness. It’s like some devil, friendly in its way, happily accepting the invitation to return as I call it by name in the dark of night. I am flawed, devil. Torture me.

Are you aware that the calendar and the clock are fictions? Believing in them is simply an agreement we have made, a means to exert a semblance of order, as best our human minds are capable, on the complex cyclicality of the whirling gears of the celestial bodies. We mapped them with numbers we found pleasing. A day, roughly the period between sunrise and sunrise, is a real thing, something we can experience, but there’s no reason, none whatsoever, that we declare it to be 24 hours long. A month–the period from full moon to full moon–is a real thing. A year–let’s call it winter solstice to winter solstice–is as well. But they don’t map onto each other with the comfortably comprehensible elegance that our clocks and calendars imply. The lunar cycle isn’t exactly 29 days, and it certainly doesn’t exist in obvious-to-human-eyes phase with the not-exactly-365-day year. We say twelve months, but we’ve divorced our months from the moon that inspired them. Twelve months in a year? It’s closer to twelve-point-five.

But to disregard the calendar because, in our demand that the nearby universe fit our need for easily comprehensible order, we have created a fiction is to a certain degree to miss the point. The calendar is an agreement, roughly world-wide at this point, that we will order the parade of our days in this manner. It could have been different, and in some cultures, actually has been. Our seven-day week connects to no natural phenomenon at all. (Surely it exists because, in a particular creation myth deeply important in our culture, the creator rested on the seventh day.) We declare there to be twelve months in a year? Okay. We put the new year not on the winter solstice, as it naturally should be, but a handful of days later? Fine. (I suspect we placed our New Year’s Day there in order to be exactly one week after Christmas.) This is how we’ve decided to do it? I’ll play along, more or less.

I map my own writing year onto the calendar, after all. The two weeks before the calendrical New Year are my yearly sabbatical. The new year that matters more to me, the energetic new year, I therefore celebrate in my actions away from the action of writing, which has for so long defined me.

In my center, I know the solstice to be the true start to the new year. But the part of me that exists in agreed-upon conversation with the world is happy to say that today is different from yesterday, to mark it with a new number, and to wish everyone I speak to a Happy New Year.

As this is the Refill closest to New Year’s Eve, I want to wish you a safe and fun and happy ringing in of the calendrical new year, with just exactly the right amount of intoxication to meet your needs.

And keep in mind that “fun” doesn’t need to mean “social.” Last year, I locked myself in my house, alone, and it was perfect.

The calendar is a fiction, but it’s one we agree to believe in, and many of us are ready to see the back of the thing we called 2017. Wish it well as you send it on its way.

See you on the flipside of the calendar page.

I have claimed that I’ve never missed a deadline here on Free Refills. I think today is a good day to admit that it isn’t actually true.

Twice this late spring or early summer, during the deepest stress of my divorce, I had pieces essentially ready to go, needing at most one more read and light revision before they went up, and then simply went to bed, totally forgetting until the next morning that I hadn’t published. I remember thinking, “Wow, in case I was wanting to deny the ferocity of stress I’m under…”

Twice I have had a piece pretty much ready to go and then let myself get distracted by a girl. On reflection, this was obviously the correct path.

And recently, there was a night when Jerry and I got to talking, and then got into the whiskey, and I prioritized the fun, the joy, the openness of the release into the immediacy of the moment over getting my writing done.

Every single person in my life with whom I’ve spoken about the daily publishing has urged me to ease off a little, has said that I seem a bit too rigid, has questioned if the lack of flexibility really serves me. Perhaps interestingly, in each of the above instances, I have forgiven myself readily. The more flexible path has seemed to be the correct one.

And this is why I’m sharing this now, during the time when I’m speaking of the sharpening of tools. I set something about daily publishing down during the run-up to my sabbatical. What I picked up at the start of this piece, I can see as scratched and dinged and well-worn from use. With this piece of writing here, I hone this tool to a new edge. It gleams. Is it the same tool, now to be used in a slightly different way? Or is it a new tool entirely?

Let’s test the sharpness of one of my tools.

Last week, I titled a pair of pieces, “Atlas Yearns for Rest.” Any piece with “Atlas” as the first word in the title surely can’t help but bring to mind the book by Ayn Rand and the question of whether or not that was on my part in any way intentional.

I can’t really help it that, over the course of her career, Ayn Rand managed one time to fit two words together in a way that actually evoked something interesting. But just to make clear that though I agree that evoking Atlas’s burden makes for compelling imagery, it doesn’t mean that I have space in my life for Rand’s chicken scratchings. Let me offer this:

By any measure taken with an open heart, Ayn Rand was a hideous person who espoused a hideous philospohy. Her inane worldview appeals to people smart enough to get their ideas from books–which does, let’s be clear, put them into a small minority–but not smart enough to realize those ideas are misguided, dangerous, and stupid. Ayn Rand is most famous for her novels in part because her hapless propagandizing on behalf of her sub-moronic philosophy can only work in a space in which she can set up countless straw men and then let her so-called heroes knock them down.

If you have been fooled by this swindler, I urge you: read more widely. Good ideas ring with clarion brightness and the sweetness of tiny bells. And consider opening your heart. The essentially grim black-and-white of the world she paints (or, more accurately, scribbles in crayon) is a far darker, sadder, less tasty place than the world as it really is, if only you allow it to be.

A task of winter is the sharpening of your tools. Taking a tool and honing out the dings and scrapes of the prior year and bringing it to full working order is a form of contemplation. Sit by the fire, do what needs to be done, see the dancing flames, feel the warmth, and reflect.