Metabolizing Change

There are as many ways to digest this global pandemic, and the death of The Way Things Were, as there are people.

If words are pouring out of you, and your shelter-in-place time is offering room for creativity, enjoy it, follow it, savor it.

If you’ve lost your job, are still working in essential services, are caring for others in your family, or any other of a million scenarios, this might not feel like a time of creative output. You can let yourself off the hook. Just metabolizing the immense changes occurring every day is enough. Just surviving is okay. Just stay alive.

(If I hear "unprecedented" one more time, I'm gonna scream.)

(Originally posted on Instagram)

NaNoWriMo 2019: Favorite Reference Desk Topics So Far

I'm at it again: this is my ninth year participating in the National Novel Writing Month challenge. I'm doing it rebel-style this year; rather than writing 50,000 words toward a new novel, I aim to clock at least 30 editing hours on my work in progress.

And, like every year, I allow myself some time to wander in the ever-marvelous Reference Desk area of the forums. This is where NaNo writers come to ask the specific and often peculiar questions that arise while they're writing their novel.

Here are my favorite topics so far this year:

• What’s a goat’s equivalent of a post-coital cigarette?
• What’s a chronic illness that could affect (and possibly kill) a Victorian-era child?
• If You Are Including Livestock, Consider This
• What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen?
• Please tell me about Alabama! Or Tennessee! OR VIRGINIA!
• It’s 1776 and He’s Having an Anaphlaxic Reaction to a Radish

I love human creativity. I love NaNoWriMo.

Now, back to it.

(Previous year posts about Reference Desk topics: 2014 and 2010.)

Pleasure and Discipline

This took my breath away with its strength and loving perspective. Maybe you need this valuable reframe of what discipline means, too. Pleasure can be at the heart of your work, and of the discipline required to bring it into the world.

h/t @adriennemareebrown, pleasure scholar and immensely wise one

#Repost @yumisakugawa
・・・
Discipline, accountability, responsibility as sensual, erotic experiments in self-love. 🖤

(originally posted on Instagram)

6,400,099,180 Moments

(cross-posted from Instagram)

These words from a great teacher of mine have lived inside of me since I first heard them. I look at my life differently because of them—every day, every moment. I look at writing and storytelling differently, too.

“We think time is outside of us, and we also think time moves linearly, from past to present, and it’s like a fast train and we’re trying to grab on and ride it.

But time isn’t like that. Dōgen, a 13 century zen master...didn’t just listen to that and believe it. He thought, ‘For the time being - what does that mean?’ He turned it around to ‘being time.’ That we all carry time in us. There’s no time outside of us…

A day consists of 6,400,099,180 moments.

To make it easier, one finger snap has 60 moments. One moment is 1/75 of a second. And these moments are falling all the time like rain, like a mist.

And that’s us. We’re not separate from that.

We’re rising and falling and being recreated over and over in sixty moments in a finger snap…

Transiency is the naked nature of time. But it’s not separate from us.”

From “Down to the Marrow,” Natalie Goldberg’s dharma talk at Upaya, September 13, 2017.

A Decade.

This was my Facebook status update 10 years ago. That means Vu and I moved out of our last New York City apartment 10 years ago today (with the immense help of Earnest, down from Boston, and the kind hospitality of our friend Kate, who hosted our small menagerie of couple and dog and bird right after). We left on very short notice because of the shifty landlords. It was a weird way to leave.

It also means that it's been almost 20 years since I packed a Suburban to the gills and moved to NYC for college.

I was raised in Texas, but I grew up in New York City.

I have a lot of feelings about this jumble of anniversaries.