Diary

Days of Note: First Quarter White Waking Moon

Sun: aquarius (air/fixed), 7:19am - 5:50pm
Moon: *first quarter, gemini (air/mutable)
Earth: just below freezing, with gentle winds and gentle sun, but still very much winter despite the first hinting stirrings of spring


Today, my second "day off" of the week, I woke up at 6:30 AM wide awake. Of course, it being still dark and Jeff being pretty much sound asleep, I didn't bother to actually get up. Still, I was full of energy and excitement about the day. Most likely because it was my "day off" and I was eager to get back to what I'd been working on my last "day off," Wedding Wednesday — which I spent, not on wedding stuff as I should have, but on taking the first steps towards designing and setting up my new website. I can become obsessive about these things. It's always been the case that a huge motivating factor for me is the appearance and packaging of a thing. That may sound shallow or superficial, but for me, part of the thrill of a beautiful piece of writing is the aesthetic pleasure of the physical book itself: the heft and weight of it, the scent of book binding glue, the neat, elegant formatting of the fonts, the cover art. And when it comes to online writing, this spills over into websites. A website can be — contrary to so much embarrassing evidence out there — elegant and beautiful and inviting, a worthy showcase of excellent work. I want my website to be like that. And so I thrill at the hours upon hours that I get to spend tweaking code and experimenting with color combinations and layout features.

When all's said and done, though, I want to be able to fill a website with awesome material. So as much as I was excited about having a day off today, I knew that I really couldn't go much further on the website design without facing the music and buckling down to some actual writing. And weirdly enough, I was dreading that. I had a restless frustration, like cabin-and/or-spring fever, that made me worry I wouldn't be able to settle down to do the creative work I wanted to do. I feel like it's been so long since I've done creative writing that really sang my soul-song. And of course, I've been feeling pressure (or, more kindly, leadings) from Brigid that I should be turning back to this work and cultivating it. Even my aspirant work with DOTR this lesson is focused on creative work and our relationship with awen, the Druid concept of inspiration, the fire-in-the-head breath of the gods. So every day I failed to write creatively, it became that much harder to have any confidence that I still had it in me.

This morning, I got in a few hours of work before lunch, and generally wasted time poking around online reading articles and blog feeds and Facebook updates that left me feeling befuddled and muddy headed. I knew I needed to give myself time and space in which to be creative, but that restlessness was keeping me from calming down. That, plus the monthly cravings for pastries and chocolate were at constant war with my commitment to the mostly-raw vegan diet Jeff and I are trying out, and the result was the weird sensation that I was... bored. Which is hard to explain. But boredom as an emotional state, and the tension of cravings for un-filling, bad-for-me food, were hardly distinguishable. So finally, in early afternoon, I decided to compromise: I had one piece of chocolate from the stash my mother sent me in a care package for Valentine's Day, and then I went downstairs and got one of my numerous How To Write Poetry workbooks (I know where they all are now, because Jeff and I have organized our bookshelves, hurrah!). I read through the introduction and the beginning of the first chapter before getting to the first exercise. Then I sat down, and I did it. I've already shared the results.

Or, at least, the product of the process. But there were other results, too. It took me hours to write that poem, hours of weighing and pushing and feeling my way through each line. Even now, I'm not sure if it's any good or not. But the process was so satisfying and restful, and something I had missed so much without even realizing it. It was work, in the best sense of the word. Not busywork to keep me churning and spinning my wheels, not time clocked or overly specific exercises leading step-by-step. It was just the work of digging and sensing and sitting quietly listening to the rhythm of each line, each word, and working my way slowly, gently, towards the poem's end. It was so satisfying, yet calming, that after dinner I felt as though I had plenty of energy and motivation, and I was eager to plunge back in. Jeff had a few hours of work left to do, since he took time out of the middle of the day to run errands before the kids come this weekend. So I buckled down to tackle some revision work I'd been meaning to do for a while.

The plan with the new website is to make it mostly a static site to showcase my writing and publications (and possibly photographs), with a blog feature incorporated to share news and smaller essays. I won't be exporting the old Meadowsweet blog into this new site, but instead I'm going ahead with my original plan to compile the best pieces from the old blog into a book to make available on Lulu (or, possibly, through a publisher, if Graeme's small publishing company will still have me). Once I began the process of selecting and compiling these pieces (which was months ago now), I realized that many of them I wanted to expand and revise, incorporating ideas that developed in the comment threads and just in general touching them up and making them more suitable for the print medium. Because I'm a perfectionist. But the task seemed so daunting, I never really got started on it.

Tonight, I sat down after dinner and began working on an expansion/revision of the first essay. It wasn't just enjoyable, it was downright fun! I felt like I was back to my old self again, revisiting the old me who was a diehard Poet-capital-P. For so long now it seems — though it can't be more than half a year at most — I've felt not so much like a writer as like.... a blogger. And I do mean that in the derogatory sense, no matter how unfair that might be. But "blogging" (as The Doctor uses it) is like chattering gossip and bickering banter about trivia and current events. I think it could be more than that, and I used to be pretty good at staying grounded in that vision of it being more than that, but my involvement with P+P has dragged me down in some ways, I think, and left me disoriented and feeling utterly drained of creative inspiration. It is so hard to take the risk of true creativity when you feel constantly under attack my insulting snipers and overly-critical know-it-alls. It's hard not to get sucked into that world, to become small. But reading back over old posts, and working on them again with this new burst of creative juices, I felt as though I were coming home to myself. I no longer had to berate myself for not doing the work I was supposed to be doing. Even if it takes a while, even if I'm not rushing off to score the instant gratification of immediate publication in a blog medium, I am doing the work, and allowing it to take however long it takes. I may end up with some material worthy of publication in magazines (though my luck there has been less than wonderful lately). Either way, I am doing the creative work I want to be doing and allowing myself to look beyond the borders of our sometimes self-involved little community of Pagans. This, I like.

So it's been a good day, and this diary entry probably reflects that. There is much to catch up on that has been going on in my life, but I'm not going to beat myself up over not doing a better job of chronicling it. That is busywork. This is creative work. I'm also not going to do the first part of the DOTR Aspirant Lesson 3 as it is written. I will not be doing daily note-taking on my plans and goals, nor doing the weird exercise of writing with one hand, then the other for a week. I suspect this last exercise is supposed to put you in touch with your more "artistic" brain, but I have far better ways of doing that on my own. Perhaps I will turn the journaling prompts into poetry-writing exercises instead and experiment with them in that way, but in general I'll be adapting the lesson to suit my needs. I'm hoping this is alright with Bob. Since he and I have known each other in one form or another for several years now, he did invite me to just join outright as a full Druid member, but I agreed to go through the lessons. In part because it's a good refresher, and in part because I wanted to understand the community sense that was developed through the lessons themselves, and in part because I hoped to be able to give Bob some feedback on the lessons themselves and ways they might be improved. We'll see how receptive he is to me blowing off the lesson plans for this month and exploring awen in my own way.



Daily Tarot Card: The King of Wands stands noble and proud, energetic and ready for action and activity. His blood flows bright and quick with passion, enthusiasm for his work, yet as the mature "yang" of the suit, he also understands the necessity of structure and order to reign his power in, harness it and shape it to his purposes. He is a figure defined by his energy and enthusiastic engagement with the world around him and the work he pursues in it. He may sometimes try to do everything at once, and for that reason to shy away from a sense of control or imposed order that might restrict him or rob him of the space his creativity needs to flourish. Yet this tension between passion and calm, creativity and order, are held delicately and deftly under his rule.