Free Refills

This year I put down two extremely important things.

I speak here with utmost love, respect and gratitude to the woman who was my wife: after nearly seventeen years of marriage, it became clear that, together, we were no longer growing, and I had reached a point when I could no longer put brakes on my growth. We tried for many years to make it work, as befit our love. But this year it became time to set down that weight.

And then at the very end of summer I was asked to put down another major aspect of myself. For a period longer than even my marriage, I identified as a writer. Jerry challenged me to think otherwise, and so I asked the universe, and the universe provided me a clear answer: Writing is a skill I possess, a practice I will continue, and a necessary tool for the work I seek to do, but writing is now a means to an end, is no longer an end in itself.

I recognize that part of my practice during sabbatical should be a goal of spending as little time in front of the computer as possible. I love the little laptop that I do most of my work on (Linux Mint FTW!), but damn I spend a lot of time in front of it. In general, that’s not a problem–why fret about using an excellent tool?–but if the goal of the sabbatical is a little recharge, keeping myself away from it will be a productive practice.

Will I actually do so? Hard to know. There’s email to catch up on, an internet to demoralize me, Game to play. All of which attach my eyes to the screen.

And that last thing: Game. If my sabbatical is a part of my overarching goal to welcome abundance and joy, there’s nothing quite like having an open stretch of hours to devote to Game, getting lost in the pleasure of play. (This is regardless of the fact that Game is a cruel, cruel mistress.)

In the first zero drafts from the resurrection of my writing practice, all the way back at the end of 2014, there are bits about Game, including why I call Game Game. That’s writing that I should come back to. One doesn’t stay in a relationship for more than three years without having something interesting to say about it.

If things have gone as planned, by the end of today, I will have finished all my work for the rest of the year (well, writing work, anyway) and begun my yearly sabbatical. I met yearly quota of 250K. I have all my pieces through the end of 2017 scheduled. Now, optimally, I get to spend some time away from the computer. It’s recharge time.

It’s become a practice I really look forward to. It’s nice to not have to write. And the holidays are not undemanding in terms of energy. Moderating my energy expenditure during these next couple of weeks is a useful practice.

There’s a part of me that’s tempted to keep working, but I need to do my best to tell that part to chill out. My goals for next year are substantial. I’m excited to get to work. But now is the time to rest up, in preparation.

The day I wrote the zero draft for this piece was a day of struggle. I was tired and ineffectual, and I got little work done. I ended up frustrated: these are my old patterns. Why aren’t they changing?

There was little flow in my old patterns, and thus little magic. In the space I am moving into, there is much flow and much that is indistinguishable from magic. Nevertheless, my patterns are my patterns: it feels safest to do things like I always have, because I know it here. I know I can survive here. Unfortunately, my pattern has been to clamp down and let flow stagnate.

But it just can’t work that way anymore. There is a call that I must answer. If I try to ignore it, it will only cry out, louder and louder. Time to pick it up, rock it to calmness, tell it it’s safe here. I hear you. I’m listening.

Never before has Free Refills felt so poised on the precipice of change. By the end of this week, I will have completed all my drafting for 2017 (at least 250,000 words total) and will have written and scheduled for publication all the pieces through at least the end of December, if not the first week of January. I’ll get to go into my year-end sabbatical with a deliciously clean slate to ready myself for the changes ahead.

By the second week of January, what I’m publishing will be substantially different from what I’ve done until now. It has never seemed more critical for Jerry and me to finish our first book. The goal is to have it done by the end of April. Meeting that goal will demand the bulk of my writing energy; it will not serve me well to too much divide my attention. I expect that most of my Refills during these months will be pieces lifted from the zero and first drafts for the book, in part to keep focus on the drafting and in part to explore what it feels like to work from the space of “piece as part of a bigger whole.”

When I feel into my body about this shift, I feel a spaciousness and also a sense of relief. This is the shift I’ve been needing to make, a shift that’s long over-due.

Major themes from my recent work:

• The further cultivation of flow. Last week’s exploration of and work with incantations continues to prove significant and powerful. Surely this is something I will pick up again in the new year.

• Depression (and its cousins, anxiety and fear) as an area in which I have a certain expertise, and can offer help.

• The move, finally, toward truly accepting abundance into my life. The fear that arises when I consider that acceptance, which has for so much of my life led to the false safety of existential paralysis, is finally starting to, if not dissipate, at least get dealt with. (There was a lot wrapped up in Friday’s incantation, wasn’t there?)

• The process of the work itself. How the work progresses: the shift from piece (ie. complete work of art/expresion) to piece (ie. part of a greater whole) all the way, perhaps, to piece (ie. there can be fullness in disorder: a piece of broken glass, a jigsaw-puzzle piece separated from all of its mates). Also, the recognition that in asking my zero drafts to be first drafts, I’m creating problems in my work. Zero drafts and first drafts are meant to do different things.

Now that we’re in the last two weeks of autumn, it’s time to bring full awareness to the shifting of the season’s energy. In less than two weeks, we will meet the still darkness of the year’s longest night, and the old year will pass away, making room for the birth of the new one.¹

To be most skillful about that shift in energy, it is necessary to consciously make space for that shift to occur.

Here in autumn’s last weeks, it is time to slow way down. It’s time to complete our preparations for winter. Now we put our tools away, for our work this year is almost done. As we do so, we reflect: this is the year that was.

Between now and the solstice, my focus here will be on reflection. I will put my tools down to make space for the rest and rebirth that comes with winter.

---

¹ I’m speaking energetically, of course. Obviously, the energetic new year–the solstice–and the calendrical one don’t match up.

When I am called to act, I act. When I am called to act and I feel fear, I act anyway.
When I am called to act, I act. When I am called to act and I feel fear, I act anyway.
When I am called to act, I act. When I am called to act and I feel fear, I act anyway.
When I am called to act, I act. When I am called to act and I feel fear, I act anyway.
When I am called to act, I act. When I am called to act and I feel fear, I act anyway.

Why does the change in language matter?

I always resisted affirmation practice, despite multiple sources over the years declaring that affirmations absolutely work. They explained it like this: you take something you want to be true and state it in the present tense. For example, if you tend to stay up too late at night, then need the alarm to get yourself groggily up and to work, and this is a pattern you wish to change, you might say, “I go to bed early enough that I can wake up naturally, refreshed and ready to meet my day.”

That present-tense expression is part of the key, every source I’ve ever read agrees. You don’t say, “I want to go to bed…” or “I will go to bed….” You say, “I go to bed….”

So then what was my resistance? Because as soon as I taught the practice, I understood completely that it would work.

Once I couched it in terms of energy–that words have energy, and that by making that same present-tense declaration of truth you are invoking the power of the words to make it true–then the whole practice fell into place for me. And that pointed to the problem with affirmation. Affirmation has the wrong energy. If I say, “I am tall,” I am affirming the fact that I am tall. (Relative to the general population, anyway. Let’s not quibble.) But if, for example, I say, “Each month, I earn five times my expenditures”–which is not currently true–I am affirming … what exactly? I guess I affirm my desire that it be true–but the language of the present-tense expression jars with the reality. Every time I tried it, it felt like I was lying.

These present-tense linguistic constructions invoke the power contained within the words in order to make real what currently isn’t. You are, more or less literally, casting a spell. So let’s acknowledge it as such. Affirmation is a weasel word. It takes magic and hides it behind the banalities of psycho-speak. Instead, let’s call them what they are. Let’s call them “incantations.”

When the universe requests my presence, I am present.
When the universe requests my presence, I am present.
When the universe requests my presence, I am present.
When the universe requests my presence, I am present.
When the universe requests my presence, I am present.