I Have to Write Something

writing about not writing

path from lake to retreat house, Seneca, SC

I should have paused your subscriptions, but I didn’t realize it would be weeks and weeks. I thought, eventually, I’d pull it together. This week, I finally got an unsubscribe from a paid reader with “low volume” listed as the reason. At nearly the same time, I opened an email from a close client sharing she’d elected to become a paid subscriber, but had not received an issue since March 30.

It’s all true. I’ve struggled since the beginning of the year, but it’s been a desert these past six weeks.

Actually, I drafted half an essay about my recent journey with psilocybin mushrooms thinking that could be a come-back, because everybody wants to hear about drugs, even if they don’t agree with doing them. The taboo is too interesting.

The truth about my writing desert is less interesting. Andrew, my husband, and I hosted two retreats since I last published, one in April and one the first weekend in May. We also had a wall taken down in our kitchen and ripped out all our cabinets and countertops and the sink, so I’ve been doing dishes in the laundry room for more than a month. Shit is piled up everywhere while we install shelves and organize the new shed and drywall the office so we can move out of working from our camper. I ordered and returned four rugs for the living room, the re-packing of which took an entire morning.

This week, a cousin texted me pictures of her new dog and innocently said, “I hope you all are well and happy!” To which I guess I couldn’t help responding: “We are well. Overwhelmed with the choices we’ve made in life… to be entrepreneurs and homeschool and renovate our house lol, but otherwise really very well and happy.”

Anyone who knows me testifies to my truth-telling, they love me for my honesty. But I see the parts of me that do not want to tell the truth because it is not convincing enough. Nothing catastrophic has kept me from stewarding this newsletter. I just can’t keep up.

On Monday, I read two newsletters (very quickly, scared to indulge the time) from Faith Dwight and Cody Cook-Parrot. Cody’s was about being exhausted and Faith’s was about not writing enough newsletters due to having less opinions than she used to. I could have written them both, I thought to myself, at least someone is saying the things I can’t find the time or stamina to language in my own publication.

Faith also noted, after taking an unintended month-long break, that her readers probably didn’t even notice her absence. We are all too busy and absorbed with our own existence to actually miss another email in our inbox. I comforted myself with this sentiment for several weeks, but I have to admit we’ve surpassed the relevance of that consolation.

I am simultaneously sorry, because I understand that some of us have a monetary agreement, and perturbed, because I don’t agree with life being this way - so time-demanding I cannot reasonably attend to the few channels of my professional work (two weekly circles, a small roster of clients, and this newsletter)… if I also want to keep the boys at home, eat decent meals, exercise occasionally, vacuum the floors, and sleep more than 5 hours. Not to mention have an unscheduled minute.

Unscheduled minutes feel like a shame-inducing luxury. And if one turns up, I am too quick to turn it on the laundry pile or those unending dishes in the utility sink.

The curious and uncomfortable reality is that the problem is really just me. I want to blame life or culture or the man. I feel a diatribe on the pitfalls of our first-world predicament in my throat. But as long as I am passing blame and wishing this was different without taking self-responsibility for my own choices and power, nothing will change.

Every week I will keep writing on my anti-gratitude list: I am grateful my newsletter isn’t ready and subscribers are unsubscribing.

Sometimes we see what we need to do and we still can’t do it. Sometimes we take a vow: For 30 days, I will wake at 5 am, run for 20 mins, and then write for 2 hours. Today, I’m not sure which way this will go for me.

After the second retreat we hosted, and those four grams of mushrooms turning me inside out, returning to life-as-usual proved difficult. It took two days to realize I was in contraction. Offering the retreat and journeying with psilocybin were highly expansive, consciousness-increasing experiences. According to natural law, any expansion is followed by a necessary contraction. In Fourth Way language, payment must be made. The flower dies to release its seed. Summer curls to winter.

So this past week, I made an aim: Go gently through the contraction.

In a sense it means, let it be what it is. But also: go, nonetheless.

Parts of me want to tie this reflection up in a tidy promise-bow to never not publish this long again. Parts of me want the vow. Other parts are lazy, apathetic, easily distracted, and disillusioned with newsletter writing altogether. All 987 little i’s Gurdjieff says we have.

But there is something else. A wish, standing apart from the menagerie of little jane’s I know as my personality. Somewhere in here is the primordial longing to manifest. As the Sufi hadith goes… I was a hidden treasure and I loved to be known.

So it is for me, for us all.

Some people turn pots or paint watercolors or cook lavish meals for their families. Among a few things, I write personal essays in the form of newsletters. So I suspect, with a little going-gently and a lot of self-responsibility, I’ll keep on writing newsletters.

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FOR OUR BENEDICTION, in the words of Jesus: "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." - Logion 70, The Gospel of Thomas

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Let’s catch up - what are you bringing forth right now?