I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Sunday Planning, I plan for the week ahead.
In his book of essays What Are People For? novelist, poet, and environmental activist Wendell Berry, who passed away last week, writes:
We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness…
True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation.
One’s inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources.
In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.
It’s a bit paradoxical, that one must retreat from contact with others to make one’s self more fully available for communion with others.
I find myself retreating more and more from the world into solitude, but not because I don’t want to connect with other people, because I want to create a foundation for more subtle and meaningful connection. Like George Bernard Shaw, I need to labor on my own for some time, for possibly a very long time (he did it for eight years!)
The world tells you right now: if you want to be a writer, you need to do it out loud. You need to build an audience, with a newsletter perhaps, and with a regular cadence of published, polished writing. If you go with Substack, you need to engage with potential readers through their Notes feed.
But I want to do it Shaw-style. Maybe I want to go into hiding for eight years — I’m already more than two years in — and write multiple books, none of which might ever be published.
The world also tells you: You need to be coupled up, ideally married. You need to have a rich social life. You need to workout three to five times a week for 45 minutes each time. If you’re retired, you better have at least five million dollars on hand, better yet ten.
I want to live my life my way. And I feel called towards a period of solitude that is deliberately chosen and fully enjoyed.
And about that grass
My grass lawn feels oppressive to me right now, another example of the demands that society makes and I have internalized.
I live in a golf course community so you might imagine the people who live here are, for the most part, very dedicated to creating beautiful blue grass lawns. Much of my front yard is a cottagey garden, but I have a bit of grass, both in the front and in between the neighbor’s house and mine.
I had an old tree removed from the side lawn and now there is a bare spot. The bare spot made me think, “maybe that could become a flower bed.” And so I’m pondering moving some of the irises I have over there.
This morning I woke up unsure though. I thought, “maybe I should just fix the bare spot next spring with seed or sod.” I thought, “a flower bed on half of that area might look silly.” I can only change half of it over into a flower bed because the other half belongs to my neighbors, and they are dedicated to grass.
But perhaps I ought to go forward with the flower bed because it’s symbolically the right direction for me. A flower bed of irises, day lilies, and catmint is much more authentically me than more grass. And the opportunity to make it happen myself is very one-in-herself.
So this week, one of my projects is to continue digging up the irises (which need to be dug up, divided, and replanted regardless), to plant some in the bare spot, and possibly, to put black tarp over the grass that I intend to remove. That will help it die over the winter and make it, I hope, easy to remove in spring.
Meanwhile
This week I’ll be executing Week Two of my four-week transition towards my full Flow Allocation porfolio program for the IRA account that I recently took over from my asset manager. I’m also going to start moving two other accounts towards that approach: my Roth IRA and another small traditional IRA I have. That will leave only my income account for options wheeling.
On Thursday, I’m dropping off my book assemblage at the University of Denver for the WCACO (Un)Altered Books show. And Wednesday evening I’ll be joining the Zoom call for the WCACO exhibitions committee.
Aside from those activities, I’m going to see how I can intensify my writing activities by letting go of the persistent feeling that I need to share and publish more, versus working on book manuscripts just for myself and my sense of coherence right now.
If I let go of the drive to publish, for example on my own substack newsletter, will that help me go deeper, learn more, generate better ideas? That’s the hope.