I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Sunday Planning, I plan for the week ahead.
Today I feel like going somewhere, but I don’t know where. I drew the Six of Swords in a Tarot reading this morning, and it seemed to express where I am: pushing off from troubled waters into a calmer sea, a child by my side. Someone else is rowing for me, perhaps a higher wise version of me or perhaps the universe itself, the currents taking me to my future. Six swords plug up holes in the small boat we’re riding in.
This card suggests moving away from pain, and can mean running away from problems. The swords plugging up holes in the boat could be stories I’ve told myself that are holding my psyche together. The child may mean new beginnings although to my eye it says, “Your decisions don’t affect just you.” Since I had my first child at 28 I felt tethered to something outside myself, not burdened exactly but responsible in a way I wasn’t before. In almost every big decision I make, I think of its impact on my children.
I suspect this card resonates with me today because yesterday I pivoted my memoir project. I caught the idea I might write a non-fiction self-help(ish) book with philosophical ideas about love. My reflections about reckless love vs reckful love seem to have within them a really powerful concept for a book.
I spent all day developing an outline and writing the introduction and first chapter. It flowed quickly and easily, suggesting that this is a productive direction.
I intend to use my personal memoir stories along with cultural touchstones (from books, television shows, and movies) to illustrate the points I’m making. I watched the 2011 film version of Jane Eyre as research. It was lovely, and poignant. It made me feel I haven’t lived with enough passion or pain in my life. But that can’t be true! I’ve had far more passion (leading to pain) than it seems like most people around me have. Or do they just not reveal it so readily as I do?
All I want to do now is write, and research for my writing. My painting practice has dwindled to nothing for now. I feel like I have no paintings left in me, even though I have canvases galore and plenty of tubes of paint.
I saw my mother recently and told her I intend to make writing my vocation, my direction, my source of income and the way I create value in the world.
“That sounds lonely,” she said.
But it’s not lonely to me. It’s nourishing, inspiring, sustaining. When I write, or collect and study and understand ideas for my writing, I feel most myself.
What is lonely is when other people don’t understand. But I recall Lily Tomlin’s quote that I love so well:
Just remember, we’re all in this alone.
Part of the difficulty of the concept I’m developing is that reckless sounds bad and reckful might sound good. It’s useful to contrast these with wreckless and wreckful, which would have opposite polarity. Something wreckless would be very sturdy and safe. It would be reckful. Something dangerous and risky would be wreckful, you’d be likely to wreck yourself in it.
Everyone thinks reckless is bad, but I think it’s good. Just like something wreckful would be good because it would wreck all the things that need wrecking: your egoistic sense of self, your clinging to societal norms, your anxiety about your financial situation.
None of these help you become who you might be. Still, they have their place.
This thinking of word coinage (or rather, in the case of reckful, word rejuvenation) reminds me of something my older daughter said one time: “cool means hot and hot means cold and cold means lama branch and lama branch means prankle.” In her lingo, prankle was a good thing and brangle was a bad thing. Later triangle would come to mean being very cutely clueless, like our German Shepherd Smokey. In the last years of his life, he was our resident Triangle. That coinage came from my second daughter. They are each brilliant and verbal and crazed in each their own way, like their mother. So is my son, who called my third child “the grub” when she was little for her darling chubby face, and said “she’s speaking Grubbish,” when we couldn’t understand her still-developing language.
This week, I will pick up a painting at a show that’s ending, and I have tentatively rsvp’ed to attend a painting critique workshop on Saturday for Women’s Caucus for Art, Colorado chapter. As I’m not feeling much into painting I’m not sure I’ll attend the workshop.
I’m also in the process of updating my estate plan. I’m working with a guy I went to high school to create a very simple trust along with the other documents I need (financial power of attorney, healthcare power of attorney and advance directive, will). But I feel really sluggish about actually moving forward with it.
Besides that, it will likely be all writing all the time. I wonder how fast I can produce a manuscript ready to share with a developmental editor for review? The ideas are flowing. I don’t see any reason to slow down.