Dear Reader,

Welcome to December. The wood stove has been roaring for over a month now and the snow is blanketing the meadow.

What does it mean to really live offline when you have a job that requires you to be, well, very online? Perpetually with lap top open, logged in, bending toward the glow of the screen.

These are the questions I’ve been asking myself this year as I experiment with having deleted my Instagram accounts, no longer using any platforms or social media, and am currently using a phone without a web browser or email.

These are the inquiries I’ve been sitting with as I return to a document I wrote in 2018 called Offline Practice. I wrote it on my typewriter and used it in a small workshop I taught at Otherwild in LA.

I offer it to you today as this research remains true over seven years later.

This weekend starts a three week class of the same name, because I wanted to return to this exploration. Part of living offline is also going through the archives, not always trying to invent something new, and seeing what has been left unexplored. I ask - what have I already written that wants to be tended to again? Not out of laziness or lack of new ideas, but to build the trellis of what is becoming of this ecosystem.

In its simplest form living offline requires turning off the phone and shutting down the computer. Then you are offline. When you open those things, you are online. In keeping with this simplicity I don’t have to outdo myself, always trying to outrun the next great meandering of how to unhook from the digital space. If I want to be online less, I have to go to the internet less.

This year I invented PROMPTS, which you’ll get a more proper introduction to in the coming weeks. It’s a monthly analog newsletter that starts at the top of the year. While I dearly loved hosting Landscapes, my digital writing group, I felt the sense of being too online. Because the reality is I can turn the wifi off and write on my computer. I don’t have to be online to write on this machine. Closing the writing group is what lead me to finally laying the groundwork for an offline newsletter, something I’d been dreaming of for years.

Whether it goes out to three people or three hundred, I knew I wanted a dedicated space to work in the non digital sphere with other writers. To provide them with generative material for their own writing that doesn't require them to look at a screen.

In sharpening this I thought of the herbalist Rosemary Gladstar’s herbalism class that she offers both online AND as an offering in a binder. She’s been doing this for decades, and I’d love to create a writing class that doesn’t require the internet at all.

I have so many ideas I am looking forward to sharing more about in class over the next few weeks. My own projects I want to spit through the cycles of the prompts and exercises we’re doing. I never teach a class I don’t want to take myself.

As this calendar year begins its closing ceremonies I want to really root into my own contemplative practices. Asking myself questions about what I want to bring into the world next year, through the World Wide Web and the web we spin together.

I am finding that attention acts as my compass. Attention as an act of remembering. Remembering what I like, who I am, and where my interests lie. Living offline is not an act of disappearance, but an act of solitude. An act of finding togetherness without rigidity.

There has to be trust in the practices. In quilting, writing, dancing, Pilates. That without an algorithm they hold just as much validity.

What is enough?
What wants to be tended to more slowly?
What rises on the trellis without my meddling?

Offline Practice is my attempt to answer these questions in community — to see what happens when a group of us experiments with shifting our attention back toward our actual lives.
Not rejecting the internet, but re-positioning it.

I call in these practices to relate deeper to the living world, not to be farther from it. In being offline, the world becomes textured again. In living offline, I stay awake to my own life — so that I may be attuned to the lives of others.

Sifting through what appears scattered to know what is essential, and trusting that in less searching, with ease it may find me.

→ If you missed out on Cody’s Big Week of Sales there is good news for this cosmic Cyber Monday - ALL DEALS ARE BACK ON FOR 24 HRS!

Plus when you buy something today you get a bonus Notion template to track your own writing practice for the month of December with a database for entering in the data and prompts for getting started (This gets emailed manually by end of day, and will also be sent to everyone who bought something last week!)

→ NYC friends : Tamara Santibañez has two spots left for their sliding scale care day (this Thu) offering private sessions of reiki energy work and optional NADA ear acupuncture, a perfect way to reset after a physically and energetically demanding week

→ A new season of Flexible Office starts this morning (no worries if you missed today-jump in anytime) Every Monday and Wednesday 9-10 EST through January 28

→ Tomorrow on giving Tuesday I’ll be redistributing a portion of profits from my big sale week to No Name Book Club’s Prison Program

→ As you know I love all episodes of Off The Grid - but this episode especially where Amelia names her own politics and the political values of the show with such precision and clarity inspired me deeply. I love my creative community so much. Amelia will also a special guest at my class Offline Practice.

→ Just started reading Radical Healership by laura mae northrup and it is so good (Thank you to my amazing Fieldwork group for recommending)

→ Reading An Eros Encyclopedia by Rachel James

→ Astrologer Emily Hall interviewed me about my Saturn Return

→ Cried to this today

Do you yearn for the days clients traipsed through the woods to knock on the elder witches' door? Do you feel repulsed by reels? Unmask your marketing

20-week healing group exploring Women Who Run With the Wolves through myth, reflection, embodiment & community. Women & gender-expansive folks welcome. 

How's your 2025 landing? Revisit the year's themes w/a FREE 90-minute Hermit Year writing workshop facilitated by creativity badass Catherine LaSota

Winter Book Cocoon: A 90-day book coaching program for (queer) speculative fiction authors & cultural anthropologists. Scholarship available

Want to book a classified ad for Dec 22 or January? They’re 30% off for the next 24 hrs Click here

→ info@codycookparrott.com
→ Pre-Order The Practice of Attention and get The Attention Audit Workbook
→ www.codycookparrott.com
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