Hi.
Coffee: 50/50 mix of Wegman’s brand ‘Daybreak’ dark roast and Homebody Coffee Co.’s ‘Mindful Morning’ naturally decaffeinated dark roast. We’ve been mixing half-calf blends with Homebody coffee for a couple years now. Less jitters (or an excuse to drink more coffee). And the Homebody always steals the show. Every roast we’ve tried is good, solid, something to sink roots in.
Anyway, I guess this is a surprise. Three years of silence, at least on here. I wonder what the WordPress algorithms do to surface rise-from-the-grave posts like this? Are you all still active on here? It would be nice to think this will show up in inboxes with a bit of shock. Not good shock, bad shock, just shock. I like being surprised myself, especially at small, minimally urgent things.
So, the question – why am I writing this? Mostly because I felt like writing something and couldn’t think of what else to write. For the two-ish years of consistency that I kept up this blog, it was nice to have an outlet where I could slap words down and get that healthy/unhealthy mix of satisfaction and ‘obligation-fulfilled’. That’s sort of what made me stop keeping this up, also. ‘Art’, whatever that means, gets loaded in the ‘artist’ like a cruise missile, shot off deliberately, horrifically, to bombard some part of your sense of peace and calm and ‘non-obsessiveness’. Doesn’t have to be this way, often is, certainly was for me. An excuse not to change or challenge more fundamental ways of being, a constant sense of dread that you’re not living up to an artificial ‘purpose’. I really thought I was writing the blog because that’s what I was ‘supposed to do’. Build and audience, create a scene, maybe sell you something. But in the background, all the thoughts and inspirations inside me had clean vanished. Not entirely unconnected. And all of it a ream of habits learned from infancy living in this strange, hierarchical, anti-human capitalist world. That’s not to say the world is responsible for all my internal struggles, but it certainly leant credence to the more toxic aspects of ‘trying to be me’.
I didn’t come back here to be super negative. I didn’t come back with anything specific in mind. You know that feeling when you go home – your hometown, where you spent the most significant portions of your childhood – and you’re more surprised at all the places that HAVEN’T changed than the ones that have? Writing this feels a bit like that. Water in a river, fixated on the riverbed.
I’m working these days on being ‘whole’. There’s a beautiful view of trees, cautiously cluttered, out the backyard of the townhouse I’m staying in. Our cat likes watching the leaves and sometimes I don’t even know what she’s watching (let’s be honest, most of the time I don’t), but sometimes I catch the same thing in her eyeline, like a squirrel, or a deer, or a bird, and it’s great to just sit there, usually in the mornings, with a cup of coffee, seeing something so totally differently than this little creature, but knowing she still ‘sees’, and feeling so peacefully insignificant beside the boundless, egoless wisdom of a cat. That’s the best parts of life right now, and though I’d be lying if I said those moments were even most of how I spend my time, it’s what I’m slowly working toward.
No breath from me will do much to hurt or hinder the sorrows of the world, and there’s so much privilege built up to allow me to even have these slow moments. So, I’m just trying to be honest with myself, thankful for the losses that give me this, and hoping my own healing fits in somewhere in our collective.
Thanks for reading. Maybe I’ll post again someday, we’ll see.
Currently Reading: A) The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin; B) Work Emails; C) posts about video games and anti-capitalism on reddit
Meow.
A cat named Wallet