Category: Space
Monday, Jul 26, 2021 | Adventure, Driving, Fire, Friends, Fun, Holidays, Source, Space, Spirit, Travel, Weekend, Word of the Year, Work |
Week three of intensive revisions. It will take as long as it takes; but also, the work somehow needs to fit itself into the deadline. When I last revised this novel, it was pre-pandemic, and I had a ten-day window to overhaul the whole thing, and somehow I shifted into what in retrospect seems an improbable state of mind, in which I worked twelve hours a day or more, writing brand-new material, sometimes as much as 10,000 to 15,000 words a day. By the end of the process, I was pretty sure I was in an altered state, that I’d driven myself to the brink of madness, and that what I’d accomplished had been a feat of stamina and focus that seemed impossible (and unwise) ever to put myself through again.
So this round, I have more time, and I’m taking it.
I find that I can write for about 6 hours maximum, before my focus begins to wane, or my mind just shuts down, weary, out of gas, the errors and typos beginning to multiply. So I figure it’s best to stay within these limitations (which feel physical as much as mental). I’m trying to stay patient, I’ve got a solid road map to follow, and I keep assuring myself that the work will get done, it will get done. I just have to give myself space to rest, when I hit a tough spot, and time to relax in the off hours: I have to go for walks, runs, see friends. And I must use the golden hours of maximum attention for nothing but this work.
To this end, I’ve set up a vacation message on my email account, naming what I’m doing as a writing sabbatical. I’m at my desk, the message says, but I’m not available. The power of creating this message can not be understated. Why? Because it names what I’m doing as important, it outlines in simple terms my priorities. I think it’s a message to myself as much as to anyone who might be reaching out via email. The message says (to me): It is my responsibility to protect what matters. No one else will do it for me.
These photos are from this past weekend, when my daughter and I visited a friend’s new farm. It was a holiday, but I also took my laptop and worked in various locations, mostly in the car, while chauffeuring my daughter and her friends around.
When I got home yesterday evening, I finally turned down a volunteer opportunity that I’d been weighing, and really wanting to say yes to. But I realized that to say yes to this would be to squeeze my writer self. And she can only be squeezed so much before she begins to fade, to waver in her belief in herself, but also in her basic ability to get her work done. I am trying to take the lessons I’ve learned during the pandemic, which has been the most productive writing time of my entire life, and continue to apply them as the world opens: lessons about the cost of accepting (even seeking!) responsibilities atop responsibilities, commitments atop commitments. Lessons about the cost of squeezing out my writing self. Which is, at core, my fundamental self: the self I am that is not attached to anyone or anything else.
The pandemic freed me, quite a lot; it forced a change in long-held patterns. It jolted parts of me to life again. It reorganized my priorities.
I’ve seen this happen for many others, too, including my friend at the farm who until very recently was my neighbour; the leap she’s made is bigger and more challenging than the leap I need to make, to protect my space and time for writing. I watch her meet this amazingly brave and heart-led challenge and think: I BELIEVE.
xo, Carrie
Friday, Jun 11, 2021 | Big Thoughts, Blogging, Confessions, Publicity, Publishing, Space, Writing |
I laughed out loud when I heard that Donald Trump quit his blog because no one was reading it. As someone who has been tapping out and publishing blog posts for — eep! — 13 years or so, I would have been happy to predict (for free!) just such an outcome for Trump and his marketing team. A blog is old-school. It’s of the past. That’s probably why I like it so much! It’s like a dream journal, but with an option to press publish. It feels both personal and anonymous (maybe that’s a bit of fiction I use to allow myself to keep posting, but that’s honestly how it feels). Connections are made that seem random and serendipitous.
Other tech platforms have replaced blogs, but so far I haven’t felt compelled to move from this medium that’s as comfortable now as a worn-in pair of jeans. I see creative people posting videos of themselves journaling out loud on Instagram, or streaming on YouTube, and of course TikTok provides a dynamic platform that seems to vault some into viral sensations, something no blog could ever do. Those are visual and aural mediums, where personalities and characters can make a sharp, quick impact on the senses; and a blog is mostly composed of the written word. Of course, the blog has also been largely replaced by the subscriber-based newsletter. And the Instagram feed provides a platform for mini-posts that feel quite blog-like: photo + words.
Where am I going with this rambling reflection on digital communications? Maybe I’m trying to figure out what this blog means to me, and why I keep returning, when other, more popular self-publishing platforms exist. I think I come back because it feels easy. The pace is calm, based purely on my interests and time in any given week. There’s no expectation that something needs to be published on Friday morning, or Sunday night; no endless stream to keep feeding, to try to be seen, noticed, liked. It’s just me and this comforting box on the screen, into which I’ve been typing words for many years.
It doesn’t feel like I’m “creating content” here.
I’m just being me, in the comforting ways that this medium allows me appear.
I would appear as someone different, somewhere else, at least a little bit, and while that could be just fine, and maybe I will experiment and grow into different ways of presenting myself, I like the me that gets to be here, at least for now.
More later …
xo, Carrie
PS Do you blog? If so, tell me why in the comments and please link to your blog.
Monday, May 31, 2021 | Art, Backyard, Big Thoughts, Chores, Confessions, Current events, Family, Feminism, Fire, Good News, Green Dreams, Laundry, Manifest, Meditation, Peace, Politics, Source, Space, Spirit, Spring, The X Page, Word of the Year, Work, Writing, Yoga |
This is a photo of a squirrel eating tinfoil on our fence; there was also a cardinal, but he took off and is the streak of motion in front of one of the blue chairs.
The days have begun to whirl again. After such stillness and waiting, I can’t quite wrap my head around it. I’m trying to declare the weekends sacred, and Sundays for meditation, reflection; a worthy aspiration, at the very least.
The truth is that I feel energized after a long quietness. So I’m not resenting an upsurge in activity even as this new stage unfolds and unfurls. But I must be cautious, awake: I don’t want to drift back into the non-stop tumble in which we found ourselves, pre-pandemic.
But, listen. It’s good. I’ll have news to share soon on a couple of creative projects. I’ve got work that feeds my heart and mind, and wonderful people around me and radiating out in expanding circles in whose company I delight, and from whom I am continually learning. I’ve been hanging laundry on the line. My children make music in the living-room. The gardens are bursting and blooming. What more do I need?
(Well, it would be nice if everyone in this house each had a chore they really loved … the way that I love doing laundry… and if that chore could be complementary, say, if someone just loved cleaning bathrooms, and someone loved vacuuming, and someone loved clearing the counters … now that would be heaven.)
But listen, too: our community, our country, our land, the whole world, it is shook up and reeling and in pain and in need, and we can’t fall asleep or wander half-dazed into how it was before, we need to be AWAKE and AWARE and CURIOUS and HUMBLE. I want this place I live in to be a little bit better because I’ve tried, in whatever ways, no matter how small … and that means stumbling, and being quiet, and apologizing a lot of the time too. There is so much to learn, and so much pain that cascades through generations. Every ceremony, every ritual, every practice, every meal I cook food for someone else, every time I stop and listen, pause, listen, pause, reflect, sit, still, breathe, laugh, hug, cry … no action is neutral. This past week in Canada, 215 children were found buried in a secret grave on the grounds of a former residential school, and this is our present. This is not history. This is our now. So much cannot be fixed, must not be forgotten; bad governments, bad systems, hierarchies built to maintain power, no matter the costs. And here we are, human beings, whirling and bumping into each other, trying, trying, trying to figure this out. Individuals trying to look each other in the eyes, to listen, to say, You matter. I’m sorry. I want to help. Help me?
Slow down, sit, listen. Someone is trying to tell you something (not me).
That’s my present, right now. That’s my goal. Slow down, sit, listen. Breathe. Pay attention. Burn something, that too. A candle, a stick of incense. Ego.
xo, Carrie
Thursday, May 13, 2021 | Adventure, Big Thoughts, Confessions, Current events, Fun, Lynda Barry, Manifest, Meditation, Morning, Peace, Source, Space, Spirit, Spring, The X Page |
Today I went for a long bike ride on trails and paths around the city. I just kept going and going and going, seeing if I could find how the trails linked up, so I could go in a very big loop. The city is full of wildness, and birds.
I stopped to take photos, and I noticed that my mind and body and spirit were revelling in anything new. Turning down a path I’d never followed before. Discovering a street lined on both sides with flowering trees, in full bloom. Even a patch of construction gave me a sense of newness and discovery.
It’s what I crave, right now. How to exit from stasis, to experience my life in motion, as I know it to be, but do not often feel, right now. Time spins onward, but I’m like a stop-animation film performing a series of postures in my studio, my kitchen, my living-room, over and over and over. At night, the dreams have been difficult, sleep disturbed, as the day’s fears and anxieties try to untangle themselves.
Cruising slowly, gently on my bike today was pure bliss.
I think it helped to be part of the X Page workshop last night, too; to be in a space that is actively promoting the idea that the process is the experience, and the outcome or goal is a lovely result, but not the thing itself: the process is the thing. It is it. As we settled in to listen to each other’s stories, separated by our screens, by the occasional technological glitch, holding our elbows against a barrage of exceptionally sad, frightening, painful world news, the space became its own entity, and we were temporarily transported. What do I hear when I stop and listen, when I toodle along more slowly, when I take a new trail?
All day, I’m faced with choices. What if I kept turning again and again away from self-pity, away from anger, disappointment, away from the harsh self-talk that keeps me tangled in my own unhappiness. That voice will come, it will return, of course, but I have the choice to listen, notice, and say to myself, Is this what you want to do? Do you want to tell yourself you’re wasting your time, you’ve made the wrong call, you got it all wrong? Or do you want to say instead (or adjacent to, if instead is too challenging): Look what you’re making, be gentle, hold your heart dear.
In the words of Joy Harjo: “This is my heart. It is a good heart.”
Those are the opening lines of a poem / song, but I can’t find an accurate version of the text to share with you just now; below, a link to a YouTube video of Joy Harjo, the American poet laureate from the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, playing saxophone and performing the text as a song.
This is my heart. It is a good heart. Something changes in my body when I hear those words.
xo, Carrie
Monday, Apr 12, 2021 | Adventure, Art, Big Thoughts, Current events, Dream, Fire, Friends, Fun, Peace, Source, Space, Spirit, Stand, Success, The X Page, Word of the Year |
Inquiries for the universe…
A few years ago, after returning from a three-week writing residency in France, I put an idea out into the universe: hey, universe, could you send more cross-disciplinary collaboration my way? I’d worked with a wonderful actor / writer / translator as part of the residency, and both of us hoped to find a way to create together again. The universe didn’t align for the two of us to reconnect, though we tried; however, as so often happens, another door opened. In fact, a few different doors, one leading to the next. The first was that I began spending several mornings a week with a young woman who had recently come to Canada with her husband and children; she couldn’t get into a language program, so I volunteered to help her with some English studies. Really, what I remember most about those mornings are our conversations. I realized that my neighbourhood, my work, my friend group, even my church was its own bubble, a comfort zone, and pretty homogenous; and that I had a strong desire to connect with people across the possible barriers of language, religion and culture. The idea for The X Page storytelling workshop grew out of this friendship.
And lo and behold, The X Page became a forum for cross-disciplinary artistic collaboration, as well as new friendships and connections. Our third season starts this week, and will happen entirely online. We’ve adapted, but the goals remain the same: artistic collaboration and exploration, and cross-cultural conversations and connections. It genuinely feels like I sent an idea out to the universe, and the universe answered.
Today, I’ve woken with another kernel of an idea: Hey universe, could I expand on the X Page workshop somehow, to make its goals available more broadly, to many more people? Here’s the spark: Before drifting off to sleep last night, I read a New York Times article about an Australian community-building concept called “The Shed.” Apparently, these “sheds” began as retreats for retired and out-of-work men, and only recently have women started their own “sheds.” The story is about women taking over part of an unused school building; their shed is run by volunteers who are also participants, and it’s a mix of socializing (playing games, eating together) and crafts/ skills, like sewing, painting, gardening, cooking, singing in a choir. It’s a mix.
When I woke up, I was still mulling over the idea of “the shed,” which sounds a bit like a community centre, but which also seems more ground-up, or holistically invented and sustained.
It’s also all very post-pandemic, and impossible right now: gathering together, in person. But hey, universe: is there something here? What do you think? Maybe it’s the idea of a shared project, like “the shed.” Maybe it’s the fact that it’s free for all. Maybe it’s the concept of having space for a variety of activities, which I’ve found makes connections across barriers easier. I’m feeling this rather urgently right now: somehow we have to find ways to make more connections, especially outside of our bubbles, in order to nurture our sense of collective care. We’ve got big urgent crises to cope with. We need to find ways to have difficult conversations, and common ground. Social media does not work for these purposes; it seems almost designed to push us to greater and greater extremes. Belonging comes from something else, I’m convinced of it—outside of algorithms that fail to surprise us, that try to sell us more stuff, and that compete for our attention by exploiting our emotional weak points.
My attention is invaluable. So is yours. It is our time here on earth. It’s what we’ve got to give.
So if you’ve spent a few minutes of your attention reading this post, I send you immense thanks. And to the universe, I send this flicker of an idea: in what ways can I deepen my involvement in building community and connection on the ground, in the real world, both now and whenever we can meet in person again?
xo, Carrie
Friday, Mar 12, 2021 | Coaching, Confessions, Current events, Manifest, Space, Spirit |
A year, a year, it’s been a year. We’re all thinking about this, aren’t we. Where we were a year ago when we knew. When we knew that something big was happening to us, out of our control — something that was shifting the ground under our feet, cancelling our plans, sending us indoors to scrub all the surfaces, separating us from friends and loved ones, making the world go quiet.
A year ago, I was so busy, so squeezed for time, so exhausted, stretched so thin, that when everything got cancelled — the X Page workshop, soccer, school and kids’ activities, the gym — what I felt in the immediate aftermath was simple relief. I was so tired, it seemed I’d been operating on the verge of collapse. Suddenly, I could sleep, and sleep is what I did, sleeping, then staggering around in a blur, checking twitter a million times a day as if I could discover an accurate prediction of the future, or figure out how to assess risk. I suppose we’ve been trying to figure that out all year. A year on, we know more, collectively, about the risks and about what mitigates risk, including wearing masks, which we didn’t understand in those early months when instead we were bleaching the countertops and sanitizing the doorhandles and washing our hands till the skin cracked.
It wasn’t until just now, as the anniversary has come upon us, that I’ve recognized my own feelings of grief and loss. It’s been a year of pause. We’ve experimented, yes, we’ve tried new ways to interacting, we’ve baked sourdough bread, and gone for hundreds of walks, and helped each other out. Some of this is working quite well: I love doing yoga online in my own little studio; I love chatting with Grandma on Zoom. And I’ve loved having this extra year with all my children still living at home.
But … but … for me, as for many of us, I’ve lost some part of my identity, I’ve lost work and volunteer opportunities, my kids have lost much of their spontaneous social interactions with peers, and I have too.
Many of us have been more alone. Or, we’ve seen people we love struggle, being more alone, and we’ve been unable to help in the ways we ordinarily would and could.
And while I’ve learned a lot that I want to keep from this past year, I’ve learned, too, that it’s important to acknowledge what I’m carrying. And the truth is that this year has felt strangely empty, like lost time. I don’t know how to explain it. But there it is. Looking back across this year is like looking at a scene in which almost nothing moves. It’s quiet. I can hear the wind and the birds. It’s eerie, too. There’s something on the edges of this quiet that is unsettling; uncertainty; a continual unfolding in all directions toward an unknown horizon. That’s what I see when I visualize this past year.
Others will have a very different picture in their minds.
I haven’t been anywhere near the front lines. Those stories of this year would be completely different in tone and energy, learning, loss and grief.
Here’s the thing. I don’t know what I want to do next.
Part of me wants to burst with the coming hope of spring and vaccines and reopenings. Part of me waits, wary and cautious, unwilling to venture any guesses, or name any desires.
And part of me floats above all this, and says, hey, this day, this hour, this moment is what you’ve got, and you are safe, you are loved, you are not alone. Let yourself be here, unfolding out toward unseen horizons.
xo, Carrie
