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I do not want to write today. I would like to sleep and sleep or keep watching Station 19 the predictable firefighter show spinoff of Grey’s Anatomy. I do not want to write today. I want to sleep and sleep or have someone come run me a bath and wash my hair. I do not want to write today I want it to be warm enough to swim outside. I do not want to write today I want to close my eyes and wake up when I feel better. I do not want to write today I want to be in one of those float tanks I have never been in that I almost went in once but then everything changed so suddenly. I do not want to write today.
And here I am, writing. I was talking to a friend on the phone the other day asking him how he connects with god and he said - I always add the word AND to the hard or painful feeling I am having. “Today my anxiety is through the roof AND everything feels as dark and grey as the sky outside, AND god is protecting me and it’s higher power’s timeline and one day at a time I know that I will carry on.” This conversation with spirit is ongoing, it is a daily practice, and this is what I hate the most about it. The relentless undoing.
I perhaps project that I love practice, discipline, and unending devotion to tending to myself and my projects and my good nature. But I am so exhausted from fighting myself creatively. So exhausted from fighting my higher power’s path for me which is lined with breadcrumbs of prosperity and abundance and spacious time. I eat up the crumbs while worshipping the screen and my sorrows.
I do not want to write today but I do. I have created containers for my writing to exist even on the days that I feel no spark of inspiration. My anxiety feels less today, but to be sparked would be a miracle. Everything feels dull in the sea of shoulds that flood my brain at every corner of a choice.
So how do we choose what our days look like? How do we plan even one single minute of these long war filled days? How do we pace our rest and our work and our hobbies and reading and promoting and listening and silence and speaking? In these days of utter terror and fear and nightmares. The inner landscape of dread met with the outer world of despair.
We take great stock of where our attention is going, without blame or judgement as we source the facts.
I do not want to write today but when I open my eyes I pray - god remove whatever stands in my way so that I may be of service today. Let me take the focus and obsession off of myself and my own fears and judgements. Let me be a channel for the wisdom that is outside of me. Let my little fingers fly to the keyboard to tell the people : I do not want to write today.
There is a porch here I have turned into my studio. Or rather I told the room it was my studio, but after a month of making it my studio I have yet to make anything in that room. I draw at the TV table in front of the firefighters who are banging in the captian’s bunk and then seamlessly swing down the fire pole to save a puppy. Dr. Miranda Bailey making her cameos, thx god Grey-Sloan Memorial Hospital is right up the street.
I unpacked my rocks on the windowsill and my books are in their places but I always have these piles. Not the ones with the purpose but the ones without purpose. The ones that I think I keep there to remind myself - you still have work to do. As if I cannot fully celebrate how far I have drifted in this boat with a million holes in the bottom. So the porch studio sits. Haphazard piles of fabric next to the carefully folded ones. My fatigue takes over and I don’t want to get up off this couch.
But I pray again and again, may my next action be of service to the people who might benefit from knowing what is on the other side. I organize my choices based on this, or I let my knees bend heavy under the weight of everything. The weight of not enough chicken broth or probiotics. Am I supposed to be taking vitamins? Why does my stomach hurt? I am drinking this hydration packet but is that enough water?
I do not want to write today but I do because it brings me closer to god and it brings me closer to the next thing. And I don’t have to know what the next thing is to go towards it. I am tired everyday perhaps that is grief mixed with winter mixed with the great unknown. But I write.
This week I committed to working on a specific project for 20 minutes every day and bookending it with a friend, a believing mirror as Julia Cameron calls it. I do not want to work on this project for 20 minutes today. I am afraid that I will hate myself just as much as I do when I am avoiding it with the firefighters. That to create will actually not bring about the shift. What if I expected less momentum? What if I let working on it for twenty minutes be ordinary?
The avoidance of writing is wrapped neatly in with he fear of facing the self, of facing every part of myself buried under past versions and this version. How desperately I want this version who writes for twenty minutes to be worthy of love and praise and acceptance and how I will search anywhere outside of myself for this.
My favorite thing god has given me as this Venus Retrograde moves out of its shadow, slow as hell might I just SAY, is the unshakeable knowing that I am capable of care and love and growth, and to shed those who are not is certainly god’s timing not mine. To love myself for staying in things that I thought I couldn’t survive without, and to be free of them long enough to almost laugh and say - oh, here I am. Blooming beyond measure even under all of this snow.
I do not want to write today because I think that before I write I should feel excited to write. The only thing waiting does is wait. Waiting doesn’t have another task or friend sitting with it at the bar. Ok maybe patience shows up and cracks a cold one. Then faith walks in. If we wait with great faith then we have something to work with. But waiting in hopes that the desire to write, create, paint, do the taxes, call the person back, will just appear - is futile. We must not wait and bide our time but know in the waiting is the oblivion of self - the emptiness is asking us to create from there.
I have evidence that when I show up even in the midst of believing in not one single thing - I am changed. Not in the ways I imagined, in the ways that spirit sees fit for me today. Just for today I will write, I will pick up the projects, I will organize the piles that don’t serve me, I will send many blessings to all who once did, and I will continue to savor the taste of being alone.
THE PEOPLE’S RESEARCH
LIVE ON ZOOM
SUN MARCH 13 + 20 + 27 AT 10AM PST / 1PM EST
WITH TWO CO-WORKING SESSIONS FRI MARCH 18 + 25
Deepen your writing practice, organize your research, and synthesize your notes to share in creative formats with the people who want to experience it
I am teaching this class in the zoom room and it starts in two weeks and I promise to integrate every pile of books that sits in my cottage on the lake. We’ll learn to live within the chaos of our notes, synthesize our research into books and newsletters and podcasts, we will vision a way through the creative resistance of our practices to be of maximum benefit
This is the class for you if you took newsletter class and want to expand your creative output, if you want to flow more in the practice of collecting information and synthesizing it for creative output, and want to be more connected with your physical surroundings, yard birds, libraries, and elders
Here is a link to a few months ago where I wrote about Citizen Research
Research, retreat, reporting. This is what brings me back. Every time. Because this is what being in my life looks like.
Research keeps me in the noticing, keeps me in awe, keeps me in delight, keeps me in remembering
Retreating keeps me with myself, keeps me in my practice, keeps the processing only between me and the work, keeps me coming back to center
Reporting keeps me with the people, keeps me in service, keeps me in wholeness, keeps me coming back to the cycle
This class has : Payment plans, scholarships for BIPOC students, closed captions, recordings, and lifetime access to all materials
I want to say that this week paying attention felt so painful. To witness this world takes great courage and capacity to withstand the amount of grief that swirls around and within us. I create this list of ten things each week not so that we breeze by and nod, but so that we pause. To take a look at the art and be filled with its intricacies and inspirations. To click a link and do your own research and see where a hole in your knowledge is to learn more. To choose a place each week that perhaps you want to redistribute your income to. And if you’re like - it’s just too much for me to pay any more attention than I already am, that’s ok too. We need you for the long run. No sprints here, only long walks.
Online Event: Quilts in the Contemporary Imagination with Elaine Yau, Ferren Gipson, Jahnavi Inniss and Jess Bailey 19th April 7pm GMT
Radical Possibilities: Art and Queer Identity from Common Threads Press
Weaving Inquiry Residency from June 7-19 at SUCCURRO in Upstate NY - applications due today
A list of BIPOC lead mutual aid organizations for Queer and Trans folks in Texas
A list of places to send money to in Ukraine - I took about an hour yesterday to look into each one, consider what felt in alignment to me, read about Ukranian artists and joy, histories around textiles and ceramics there, the impact of imperialism, and then sent money as a spell. I find this calms my nervous system and keeps me in contact with the humanity of it all
Still on my Madi Diaz kick and this is the one where every decade long unrequited feeling floods swiftly
Holly Whitaker and Emily McDowell’s new podcast QUITTED
The IRS - I am really paying attention to the IRS and how much money I have to give them
Trusting the consistency of chaos, to witness people go back to where they started, even at the same dining room table. The spiral shows us expectations of others dashed is our own freedom gained
I just did this google search and the results were satisfying. I am paying attention to the death do us part relationship and the gratitude to be so seen and so loved in this very short lifetime
I was actually looking for this interview with us - it’s a good read
Gentle gentle with this upcoming new moon, the swirls of grief, the boundless leaps of gratitude, may you be so held in the eye of the storm
just trying to maintain my wind on the weathervane
xo mar
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