Spaciousness (II)

It’s the experience so many of us have on vacation. I know I’m not alone in this. Where you go some place far away, sunny and pleasant, and you bring a bunch of books with you and you sit there and read and that’s most of what you do. Why did you have to travel to experience that? Well, because it’s a path to spaciousness.

You couldn’t stay home because then you are there with all your things, and all your demands that press on you, and you cannot escape them, even if you say, “During these weeks on my staycation I’m just going to read.” You’ll know that stuff is there. You can’t escape it. And it’ll feel like that, like trying to escape, rather than creating spaciousness. It’ll feel like procrastination. Like avoidance.

Whereas you throw some books in the suitcase and head off to Jamaica and sit on the beach all day and read, and it feels spacious, because all that stuff that you left behind that’s been yelling at you, “Hey! You gotta paint the bathroom and fix the chain on your bike and reorganize your toolbench.” NOT RIGHT NOW YOU DON’T. ALL THAT STUFF IS IN ANOTHER COUNTRY.

Merry Christmas

A child is born: we’ve attached the solstice day’s symbolism to a day not the solstice. (Sometimes, we believe too much in the things we create. What is “December 25th,” really, but a name?) I’ve already celebrated, in my own way, the day of (re)birth. But I’ll play along today. Strip away the ugly consumerism we’ve attached to this day, and what do you have? Reflection on a silent night. Celebration of a birth of things. Quiet and joy: a worthy ritual. Yes, I’ll play along.

Merry Christmas.

Spaciousness

I woke one recent morning to feelings of stress in the body. I went to the cushion and I sat and I tried a few things, but the best of them was trying to find a spaciousness for my energy, and it worked for a few breaths and then disappeared, and then I did it again and it worked for a few breaths and then disappeared. I was very in my head and kept coming into my head and when I’m in my head the energy tends to be very contained and not in a good way. It’s just this tight little ball of energy, and the body kind of disappears, and little energy flows even when I try and I can’t try for long.

So I was beginning to explore spaciousness, and I realized that this is exactly what I am trying to encourage throughout my life.

A couple of weeks ago I was hitting golf balls with Jerry and I noticed a certain constriction in his body and I told him to put some energy in between his shoulder blades, to draw them back with energy. Doing so allowed him to balance the energy at his front and with the energies in balance his chest opened, became spacious, and once he did so, he hit the ball far better than he had all day. Suddenly, all at once, he found an extra twenty or more yards. How did that happen? It happened because it allowed him to bring spaciousness to the chest, which brought spaciousness to the whole swing.

This is spaciousness in action.

I have been trying to simplify things in my life, and that’s the word I’ve been using, simplify, but I see suddenly that simplify is just part of a path, but spaciousness is the actual destination.

And, doubtless, a path all its own.

Clutter in my world and in my mind. Too many things. I’m seeking a new balance. I’m seeking spaciousness.

A Winter’s Day Reflection on the Change of Seasons

We live in cycles. We tend to think of our lives as linear: yesterday, today, tomorrow. Last year, this year, next. Points on a line. But seen properly, our motion through time is more a traversing of a spiral. There is forward motion, yes, but seen from a certain perspective, our life unfolds along circles. Think of it. We cycle through our days: we wake up, we work and we play, we eat and we drink, we sleep. Every lived day is different of course, but it is different the way the weather is different: today warm, tomorrow colder, no wind or windy, no clouds, a few clouds, cloudy–and so though different every day is much like the one before it. The sun sets a little earlier or a little later. I remember this summer, out on the road, when I watched nightly in the hours after sunset the dance of Jupiter and Venus in the Western sky. Every day a little different. Every day, not much different. Cycles.

Some of our cycles are human-made: our seven-day weeks, our divorced-from-the-moon months. Some of them have a deeper reality. The earth travels around the sun. Winter turns to spring, spring turns to summer, summer to autumn, autumn back to winter.

Fall is the time of consolidation. It is the time of harvest. A certain type of reflection. A looking back on what worked and what didn’t. Gathering seeds. Cleaning the tools and putting them away for a while.

On the winter solstice the old year dies and at that moment the new year is born. Birth, death and rebirth: another cycle.

Within that perspective, the first two weeks of the new year–the true New Year, as defined by the sun rather than our silly calendars, could be seen to represent infanthood. (The intersection between our calendar and the Earth’s explains, in part, my choice of this time for sabbatical.)

The first days of winter: Dark. Quiet. Cold. A time of rest. Like babes who sleep in their earliest days, we are meant to sleep, too. We are meant to stay close. It is a quiet time. This is not the time for brashness.

Soon enough we’ll already feel the days growing longer. This will be the time for beginning. Beginning, as a child begins. Those first stumbling steps.

Happy Winter Solstice

Today is the winter solstice, the day of dying and rebirth. Happy new year!

I get new rules today.

It was last year on the winter solstice that I began to write, to truly write, again. I knew it was time. Not that I hadn’t been writing in some fashion or another. There were always journals and emails and the occasional piece that just demanded to be written. I’d published a few things on Love Abides, things that were just too important to not write. But almost everything I’d written had been written because writing is a thing I do, too deeply ingrained that I ever really stop.

But writing and being a writer are two different things, and it was time to become a writer again. To begin to write again with the idea that what I’d write would be not just for my eyes, and it was different, and yes it was not unlike being reborn. I picked up magic last winter solstice and I’d be a fool to put it down again a year later. I’m in my sabbatical weeks but today, only today, am I writing. Who knows what will ask to be written. But something will ask, for that is the energy of the day.

Fall Season Reflections

Today is the last day of the fall writing season. It’s time to reflect on what did and didn’t work.

My approach with Daily Refills showed some success and some failure. It both worked and didn’t. I was successful at writing a lot of short pieces on tight deadlines. I took some real pleasure in those pieces. I learned a lot about the rhythm of pieces of that length, and how long a piece could be before it would be impossible to get it edited and published in time every day. Reading over the pieces later, I think a lot of them are successful, and I’ve had the extremely gratifying experience of readers telling me that they enjoyed certain pieces, that certain pieces made them laugh. And it was definitely fun to play more directly with fiction. With the exception of the “Ben Writes About Stuff” pieces, just about everything posted in Daily Refills was either pure fiction or at least fictionalized. (Further credence to my argument that Free Refills is not a blog.)

However, doing Daily Refills and setting them apart from and not included in my 5000 didn’t work. Yes, I’m nine months into the practice of every-weekday publishing, and I still haven’t missed a day, so that part worked, but what I learned–what didn’t work–is that trying to bring a piece from start to finish in one day just demanded too much energy. Sure, that I didn’t include their word counts in my weekly 5000 had the nice effect that I certainly worked harder on my writing this fall than I have since my Double Month Writing Month back in January and February of 2012, when I wrote 100,000 words of zero-draft fiction (an experiment I intend to never repeat). That’s gratifying in some ways, but the energy cost was just too high.

My choice to do the Daily Refills was highly influenced by my favorite webcomics, preeminently XKCD. Randall Munroe has been posting a new comic every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for years, and pretty much every Monday, Wednesday and Friday I check his site first thing. He does excellent work and I really enjoy it.

But the webcomic medium and prose writing are two different things, and while it was edifying to practice short, self-contained pieces, I found that ultimately it was getting in the way of doing anything more ambitious. And my ambition is pretty clear to myself: it’s time for me to start–seriously start–working on the books that are calling me to write them. And that means making them the focus of my writing concentration.

I can’t call any process in which I’ve learned as much as I did over the past 3 months a failure. But it’s time to change my focus to something more sustainable and more in line with my long-term goals.

Sabbatical

For the next two weeks, I’ll be taking a sabbatical from writing. I first discussed the idea here. As the holidays approached, the idea felt more and more expansive.

I decided not to stop publishing, though. It felt more powerful to continue my publishing schedule. So I’ve had a very busy week this week setting up all my pieces for the next two.

I’m still debating how much of a sabbatical I’m going to take from using the computer at all. Right now I’m thinking I’ll keep it off for the entire week of Christmas, from Sunday the 20th through Saturday the 26th (except for one exception, which I’ll discuss in a moment), and then will allow myself to use it during the second week, to make an effort to deal with some electronic clutter, the clearing out of which will bring some needed spaciousness into the new year.

And I will allow myself to use my tablet and my phone. I keep work pretty much separate from both; they’ll be used for reading and research. I don’t think I need to avoid all screens to get the benefits I’m looking for.

The exception I mentioned above: Tuesday the 22nd is the winter solstice, the true New Year, and I can’t not write on what I consider to be one of the four holiest days of the year. Last year on the solstice I came to the computer, opened a file, and, with the words, “Happy winter solstice,” set about embarking on my rebirth as a writer. More than 200,000 words later, I can safely say that it worked. I won’t let the anniversary of that day go by unmarked and uncelebrated.

Gratitude, Unforeseen

I left the party early on Saturday night. I said goodbye to everyone, told them I had to get up early in the morning because I had to work. I smiled: keep having fun, I said. I’m sure they did.

I walked home in the cold dry air. I looked up at Mt. Royal and up at the stars.

A little later, after making the sandwiches for my lunch, I was packing my gear bag for the next day. The sentence, I have to work tomorrow, was still echoing around in my head.

I stopped for a moment. I have to work tomorrow, I thought again. And then aloud I said this:

“I get to work tomorrow.”

The sun never sets on the Free Refills empire.

Happy Thanksgiving! Said My Stalker, in Her Own Special Way

I was pretty sure I packed my deodorant for our Thanksgiving trip but I couldn’t find it. I didn’t find it in the obvious place, which was my toiletries bag. It wasn’t packed among my clothes, nor in the bag in which I put my books and computer, nor in the bag with the bottles of booze, nor among my ski gear, nor with the extra towels and sheets I brought even though the house we rented had towels and sheets. And it certainly wasn’t in the bag of recycling that I’d for some reason put in the back of the car instead of leaving in the garage.

After Thanksgiving I’d be going to the condo, and I remembered bringing a stick of deodorant there, so going a few days without during Thanksgiving didn’t seem like much of a big deal. I figured when I got back home, I’d find the other stick sitting on the counter. I must have forgotten it.

Except when I got back home after that week at the condo, it wasn’t there. I looked on the counter in the bathroom and in the drawer below the counter and in the cabinet below the sink and it wasn’t in any of those places. “What the hell?” I said.

And then it hit me: it had to be my stalker. Of course she’s bewitched with my scent. Of course she is.

I sighed, rolled my eyes, and went to the closet where I keep the extras.

She’s getting trickier, though. A few days later, when I got back to the condo, I found the missing stick of deodorant in my toiletries bag, in a pocket that I never use. The only explanation–I repeat, the only explanation–is that she drove up to the condo, broke in, and stashed it there, knowing the effect it would have on my mind.

I wonder: next time I go to the apartment, the yacht, or the beach cabana, will I find my deodorant sticks missing from each as well? None of those places is even in this state. Shit, I’d have to call the captain on the sat-phone to be sure, but I don’t think the yacht is even in the this country.

I guess I’ll know next time I visit those places. She’s a tricky one, my stalker. Not always the most subtle. But quite dedicated.

DNGAF (II)

Whatever is the opposite of DNGAF, that is Hillary Clinton. You get the sense that her monomaniacal, fists-clenched ambition to be president started as a small child, maybe even in the womb. Her whole life has been aimed in that direction, and so you feel like nothing in her world happens without calculation. That it’s only after careful vetting by her advisers in light of the latest poll numbers that she decides her position on what to order for lunch. “How is tuna salad playing in Peoria?” you imagine her asking.