Category: Uncategorized (So Far)

Today the moon will pass between the Earth and the sun. A huge swath of the United States will fall into darkness.

Tell me again that the world is not animist. Nor capable, furthermore, of rather heavy-handed symbolism.

The events that began Saturday in Charlottesville and have continued ever since have left me shaken and more than a little exhausted. But I feel a need to respond.

Yesterday I began an essay with this seed:

It feels like the world is coming apart.

Am I alone in this? I do not think I am alone in this.

I’m aiming to have this piece finished by next Friday. It’ll be the most substantial piece I’ve written in a long, long time.

The risk I’m taking, though, is that with the rapidity with which things are developing, anything I’m starting this week may be totally obsolete by next. I don’t know anything to do about that but keep plugging away, but it certainly speaks to what fraught times we find ourselves living in.

If I succeed in doing with FR what I have long envisioned–that it be the home base for my entire career–then if we fast-forward to ten years from now, I expect I’ll look back and see that some of the angst I was feeling about this project during this initial period was misguided. Sure, I didn’t know where I was going. But I kept moving forward until the destination started to come into focus, and then I did the work to move myself toward that destination. From the perspective of ten years from now, I bet this movement from unknown to known is going to look pretty inevitable. “Oh yeah,” I’ll say. “I just kept working until I got there.” But I won’t recall just how uncertain the whole thing felt to me at the time (and, I assume, looked and read to those of you who are here now).

So I thought it might be entertaining to remind myself. Though guessing what technology we’ll be using ten years from now is a fraught exercise at best, I decided to assume that in ten years I’ll still be using Google Calendar, so I opened up August, 2027, and made an appointment for myself on the 17th of that month to go back and read the pieces I put up here this week. When that finally happens, I promise I’ll write a Refill about it. So go ahead and make an appointment to check back here ten years from now as well.

Two and a half years feels like a long time when you’re at the end of it, but I suspect that eight or ten or twelve years from now, when I look back at this period–what I have already, since Monday, come to think of as the exploratory initial period of Free Refills–that it took two and a half years to figure out how to move past the introductory stage will seem a pretty reasonable amount of time, nothing out of the ordinary at all.

(Regarding what I announced yesterday.)

It took two-and-a-half years of plodding, methodical keep-showing-up for the necessary flash of insight to arrive.

After almost two-and-a-half years, I finally figured out how to make Free Refills work the way I want it to. It came to me in one big download Friday night. It’s gonna take a lot of planning and organizing and almost certainly some custom coding, but I finally can see it, what it should look like, how it should work.

Sometime right around now–yesterday, today, early next week–a court here in Colorado is going to affirm my lived reality and declare that in the state’s view, I am no longer married.

I have written this week some explorations of what the notion of home means to me now, now that the old meaning doesn’t apply.

On the meditation cushion yesterday morning, the image of a tortoise arose in my mind as symbolic of something I should now aspire to. If home is not a specific place in my world, and won’t be for the foreseeable future, then to truly embrace my current life and the potential within it, I must learn to carry (in an energetic sense) my home with me wherever I go.

This is the view from the deck of the condo I’ve been renting this summer in Summit County, CO. I loved being here–here meaning both Summit County and the condo itself. Here was a haven when I needed
a haven. I looked out on this view and I felt magic.

But the condo was only ever going to be “mine” in the short-term, and so while I could play with the idea of it being home, and could try on the idea that someday I’d have a home like this–a comfortable, inspiring space in a place of beauty and magic–it was never truly going to be home.

My time here grows short, but that’s okay. I had a haven when I needed a haven. And now new adventures impend.

While we were in New York, my mom took me to see the building she and my dad lived in when I was born. They moved away from New York when I was one, so I have no recollection of this place at all. But this building was my first home.

(In case you were wondering, their apartment was on the 11th floor in the back.)

I had a great time in NYC, but truth be told, I was there for maybe 15 minutes before I started looking forward to being home. Too many people, too many cars, not enough mountains. It’s a lot of fun, but it’s not the place for me.

It’s good to be home.

But … home.

A story: a few weeks ago, I was driving back from NM. I stopped in Alamosa, CO, for a little break and I texted a friend. “Are you home yet?” she asked. Hmmm. A few weeks before, I had finished moving out of the house that had been my home for the prior ten years. I had just driven out of NM, where my family is. I was on my way back to Summit County, where my heart soars. A few days later, I’d be back in the Front Range, where I have a room that’s the closest thing you could call “mine.”

“Home is kind of a complicated concept in my life right now,” I texted back.

And that is fine. I am fortunate to have the opportunity to live this experience right now. My whole life is in a space of transition and growth. I get to explore that space without being too tied down to anything.

But one of the things my time in NYC this weekend told me is that the concept of home matters a lot in my life right now. Where and what home truly is is something I’m supposed to explore.