General Reflections on Everyday Life
You see, one cannot get cocky in winter in Colorado with a toddler. Wasn’t it last week that I was boasting about still putting out three essays while juniper had strep? Well, I got my come uppin’s this week with our gargantuan snow storm and a wee little Intestinal cleanse we carried out for juju. I usually can handle one curve ball a month. if multiple are thrown in successive weeks, I tend to struggle mightily. However, this is nothing new for long time readers of this project. I have had a writing moratorium in any week where I am cleaning up vomit and diarrhea. I am still writing, but it’s only once, instead of three times.
Aside from the excrement cleaning, I am rather tired with producing so much. This hyper-productivity has to be another way my own feelings of inadequacy in running a business have manifested themselves. In true super-virgo, anxiety-dude fashion, I have tried to work my way into people signing up for this project. I kept telling myself that if I just posted more, better essays that more people would be willing to join my weird corner of the internet and read my stories. Gosh, it’s funny when you realize that beneath the most earnest pronouncements of, “I do this because it fills me up,” there is still just someone hoping that their investment in themselves and their dream will pay off. The problem is that asking anyone to pay attention to anything but our ongoing active genocides and just trying to get through the day is sorta not fair. I just hope that folx still want some roses with their bread.
I’m not going to stop doing this. No, my intention is quite the contrary. I’m gonna take some advice I got from Risa Dickens of Missing Witches on a recent coven workshopping call and just chunk stuff up into more digestible little nuggets of song, story, and stills. That means taking my three distinct strands of photo, essay, and song storytelling and weaving them more explicitly together or just touching on one topic a week, rather than trying to do all three each week. It’s a form of resistance to notice how capitalism makes you feel, how it influences your behavior toward production, and to make the choice to turn back to something slower and more methodical.
Aside from the 20 inches of snow on the ground, it also is getting nice outside, and I will have less time to write three essays a week. I have responsibilities in the dye garden and to my riding. I am also training for my first century ride and subsequent 200k for riding. I have been toying with the idea of making this project more seasonally intensive or aloof, depending on how much I will be in my basement reflecting. As we shift to the warmer months, I will be more aloof as I have less time to write up workshop notes and philosophical essays.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to A Quiet Practice to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.