One Cobble at a Time

“Don‘t let fear for tomorrow steal today’s joy.”

I said it first to myself, a chant to push back on the anxiety that always lurks in my mind. Then I said it out loud to others, in person, on the internet, because I hoped the thought could help others as well as me. Saying the words is only the beginning of course. Following through is always harder than intention. And it is difficult to not become a hypocrite when I stand in the middle of all of my things and none of them seem to have joy attached. This is what oppression, depression, and fatigue do to our brains. We can hold joy in our hands and it feels like gray dust. So I am learning to blow off the gray just and find the tiny shining nuggets to put into my pockets. It is a deliberate practice rescuing joy from fear. It requires me to remember that hope doesn’t always arrive as and emotional uplift which lightens all we carry. Sometimes hope is expressed as the next painful step in a long slog. Joy is not always shiny and eye catching, sometimes it is quite ordinary. Seeds are very ordinary, often ugly, but if tended they grow into something much bigger and more glorious. Here are the things I am doing to gather the seeds of joy and to give them space to grow.

• Daily thoughtful study for at least a few minutes at the beginning of my day. This includes scripture reading, prayer, and sampling from at least one other book that invites me to think big thoughts. Right now I’m bouncing between Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Repentence and Repair by Danya Rutenberg, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear by Mosab Abu Toha, and Phoenix Rising by James Goldberg.
• Putting writing at the beginning of my day. Giving myself the chance to work on Structuring Life to Support Creativity, or a blog post, or a private journal entry before the endless admin and demands of the day take over all my hours.
• My morning yoga practice is currently on hold while my injured shoulder heals, but I plan to return to it. These three morning things together sometimes take half an hour, other times an hour and a half. The days where I let them take longer tend to be calmer and more joyful.
• Regular service to my house and the people inside it. This most frequently means that I’m the one cleaning up the kitchen and dishes after four ADHD adults have once again created chaos while feeding themselves. Yes our house would benefit from better balance in who cleans up the mess, but this small act of creating order out of chaos makes the world around me visibly better, and that is a good thing.
• I watch for birds. The past few days I’ve been writing down the first bird I see each day. Writing it down gives “looking for birds” and importance that causes me to slow down and watch the world when I’m out in it.
• I’ve picked a few areas for my activism focus. Things I plan to pay attention to and spend energy on. My current focus is pushing back on book banning and anti-trans legislation in my home state of Utah. I am trusting that other people will take on the plethora of other things which also need to be defended against. Because I can’t to it all by myself and if I try, I will burn out.
• I avoid the news that wants to grab me with panic-inducing headlines. This includes when online friends are panic posting about whatever awful thing happened today and which is making them scared. I’ve selected a few news sources that are deliberate and researched. I check in on those in the afternoon sometime so that I am not oblivious. When there is news directly affecting my personal interests or my areas of activism, I may dig deeper and read entire articles. Mostly though, I’m scanning enough to have a sense of what is going on, then returning to the work of the day.
• When I take actions, I am not broadcasting them on the internet unless that broadcast serves in direct support of the action I’m taking.
• I keep my to do lists and get the tasks on them done so that my family has resources, so that my business continues, so that my customers are served, so that I’m honoring my freelance contracts. Doing the work of the day pushes back on despair. It is an assertion of hope that these tasks matter, that I’ll get to make more books in the future, that the world will continue.
• In the evenings Howard and I sit together and watch shows. On the surface this may look like a waste of time, hours in front of the TV. But it serves us. It occupies our minds while our bodies rest, which is particularly important for Howard with his long covid. It also rests our minds because it turns our thoughts away from work and from anxiety. We’re “commentary while watching” people, so the experience is interactive as we critique creative choices in writing, editing, or performance. We laugh together. And we settle into a calmer and more regulated state after the affairs of the day.
• While watching TV I do sudoku and embroidery kits. Both of these are simple activities which engage my brain and my hands. They have small moments of satisfaction when I complete a puzzle or when the stitches look pretty. Neither is in any way productive toward my career or income. They exist in my life as hobbies. If I stop enjoying them, I will abandon them for something else.
• By the end of February I will get to start looking for the first spring flowers.
• I should probably start going for walks in my neighborhood again.

Some of these things don’t feel much like joy when I am doing them. Lots of them feel like work. Right now I’m spending lots of energy just to keep anxiety from crushing me. Some nights anxiety stabs me with bursts of adrenaline and for a few minutes I feel like doom is imminent. That is when I turn on Anna Nalick’s Breathe 2am and remember how to hold still. Yet the combination of all of these things make space for joy to grow. They also move me toward the life I want to be living. Sometimes hope is persistence. Sometimes reaching for joy is sitting pouring water on dirt and trusting something will sprout soon.

I watched Schindler’s List last week. I’ve seen the movie before and knew exactly how difficult it is to watch, yet I was drawn to it anyway. I watched in pieces, taking breaks to breathe. In those breaks I wondered why I was doing this rewatch, why was I staring straight at this dark chapter in history. I think the answer is that I was trying to learn how to be a Schindler. How do I be the person who protects others? What compromises and collaborations were necessary for Schindler to accomplish saving those lives? What could I do to maximize the life-saving and minimize the compromising? Obviously the experiences portrayed in the movie will not map directly to anything that is coming, but the core of it, being a person who protects, it felt like I could learn something.

Another reason is that I felt a need to remind myself that people can be terrible to each other. That I should not be complaisant because the worst is possible. My need for this reminder comes from my deep privilege in that my life is full of kind people. Even the ones who I know have caused harm did so out of mis-aimed kindness or human frailty, not out of a need to be cruel. I am so fortunate to know so few cruel people that I have to remind myself that they exist. The watch reminded me that ordinary people can get shepherded into cruelty if they go with the flow of cruel leaders. So I was learning how to recognize when the flow is pressuring all of us into places where we are either careless or harmful.

Watching this movie did not help my anxiety during the first barrage of executive orders as the new administration took office. I watched them make choices that were deliberately retaliatory, vindictive, and cruel. That is the flow coming at us from above. Given the reality of what is being done at the highest levels in my country, I have choices to make. So I watched a hard movie to figure out how someone else made choices in difficult circumstances. I may re-read The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom for the same reasons. Or I might read a bunch of soothing and optimistic fiction instead. Mary Robinette Kowal has a new book coming out, and my eyes just reminded me of Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett. Sometimes I need to look straight at the hard things. Other times I need to rest so that when hard things actually happen I have the reserves to be strong against the pressure to join in cruelty.

In midwinter when everything is dark, cold, and difficult, I have to remember that spring has already begun to do the work that will make flowers bloom.

I once listened to the Hardcore History Podcast’s series about World War One. The detailed history was fascinating, but the thing that is sitting with me today is remembering how the change in war technology meant that the best tactic for governments to achieve their political aims was to turn people into cannon fodder in battle after battle, often not to gain ground, but to see who ran out of people first. It was a brutal, grinding war of attrition. The people who paid the highest price were the young ones who were thrown into the path of those machine guns. The technology of war has changed a lot in the past hundred years. That change is not just the weapons and equipment, but also in the existence of cameras and internet. This means the battlegrounds are different, but governments are definitely wrangling for power. I can see it happening. I can see these large scale choices being made, and I can see how the incoming US administration has indicated the need for some sacrifice to achieve their goals. I hear that word “sacrifice” and I recognize that they’re planning to turn many US citizens into economic cannon fodder during the impending tariff war. I look at the list of “day one” plans and the vast majority of them are going to make my life harder or increase the burden on my already strained finances.

My life will be cannon fodder in the upcoming political wrangling. I am like the peasants in the climactic battle of the show Galavant who have built a nice little home for themselves in the spot that turns out to be exactly where three armies come together to do battle. They’re doomed to lose everything and they can’t stop it, they can only hunker down and hope to survive. Given that this is how the world at large feels to me, my instinct to entrench makes a lot of sense. I want to create safety for myself and others. If possible I want to do it without losing any ground.

I wish I had better answers than this, or less anxiety over what is coming. Anxiety aside, my job for the next weeks and months is the same as it has been for the past weeks and months: Do the work in front of me. Keep my eyes open for ways I can help and support others. Make more books.

I’m a bird watcher. I do most of my watching in my backyard rather than making time to go to natural places, but even when I’m driving around town on errands, I watch for flapping or chirping or bright moments of color. Birds are an ordinary joy and I love them. A few years back I adopted a tradition of noting the first bird I saw on New Year’s Day. (I learned this from Canadian poet and author Amal El Mohtar whose books are absolutely worth your time.) Once I know what my “bird of the year” is, I can look up what that bird might represent. It is an augury of a sort. From what the internet tells me about the “meaning” of the bird and what the bird means to me personally I decide what I’m carrying forward.

In January 2024 I saw crows. I wrote about them in my Newsletter (which you can read here). Any time I saw crows all year, they made me happy. Crows are supremely confident problem solvers. I very much was that all year long. It was a good match for the year I had.

This year my first bird was waiting for me the moment I glanced out my kitchen window. It was a small brown puff ball sitting calmly on the perch of my feeder. At first I thought it was a house finch, which is a common and domestic sort of bird. I was beginning to settle my thoughts and find peace that my bird should be so common. It was logical that a common bird would be what came to me in a year where I didn’t have time to go seek a bird and instead expected one from my backyard. Then I looked closer. My bird was a female pine siskin.

She looks entirely ordinary, blending in with the sparrows and finches, but she’s unusual. It was only last week that I spotted my first ever pine siskin when her male counterpart flashed yellow at me in my back garden. If I hadn’t seen and identified the male previously, I would have doubted my identification. I stood at my window and watched her until she flew away only a moment later. Then I did my internet search.

Pine siskins are the hope and joy which surprises us unexpectedly like the flash of yellow on an ordinary looking brown bird. Siskins are beauty found in the ordinary. Seeing a siskin might be a message to embrace adaptability and resilience.

All of those things seem like good touchstones for me as I start the new year. They fit well with my intentions and priorities for the coming year. I don’t know if I’ll get to see many siskins through the year, they’re probably only stopping through, but I’m glad this one was waiting for me on New Year’s Day.

Usually the week between Christmas and New Year is a liminal time for me. It floats not quite part of the year I’ve just been through, but also not belonging to the year that hasn’t yet started. I often use this week to create my annual collection of blog entries and journal entries into a book. Creating that book becomes a year-in-review and feels pivotal to me figuring out my focus and priorities for the year to come.
This year is different. My focus for 2025 showed up whole before I ever had a chance to review anything. And this week feels very much like a preparatory space for 2025 when things will change. My word for 2024 was bloom. It was a gift year when I got to inhabit my writer self more fully than I have in any other period of my life. I got to teach. I got to run crowdfunding for Structuring Life to Support Creativity. I got to focus and write my book. It was also a year of running frantically from project to project, trying to stretch myself to cover everything and trying to make the financial ends meet. I am so grateful for the blooming I got to do. I am exhausted by the running. 2025 brings a big shift. That shift is reflected in the priorities I have for this year (you can contrast with my 2024 priorities here.)

In 2025 I will:

Entrench. This is a combat word. I wish I didn’t need a combat word. I will be building fortifications to protect my self, my creative projects, and my precious people. I need to be part of creating places of safety and part of reinforcing important institutions. The most personally impactful part of this priority is that I need to go find a job that will give me a reliable paycheck. I’m not sure which job or on what time schedule, but this huge shift in the pattern of my life is coming and it is necessary. I need to be personally and financially stable enough to build sheltered places that can protect my second priority.

Grow. I need to grow creatively. I need to be able to explore new thoughts and new ways of expressing those thoughts. I need to plant the seeds of new projects and nurture them to see what they might become. I need to make sure that I am growing connections with people and communities and participating in the growth of others as well as myself.

Complete. I need to follow through on promises I’ve made and projects that are in process. I have mentoring which I’m enjoying and want to see through. I have SLSC that needs to come out in print and audio. I have commitments to teach, Schlock books to finish, and contracts still in process. I want to honor all of these things and not leave any of them dangling.

The year that is coming is going to be a year of work. I’m spending the last few days of 2024 preparing for it.

I’m trying to find words to talk about Christmas because I did a lot of complex emotional sorting across the holiday, but I don’t want to give the impression that the holiday was bleak or sad even though it had sadness threaded through it. I’m put in mind of an art term: chiaroscuro. In a painting it is the contrasted light and shadow on objects in the image that are created by light falling unevenly. The dark is necessary to see and appreciate the brightness. This Christmas I step back and see the whole picture of a beautiful holiday where I gathered with friends in multiple events, where I gathered with family in both expected and serendipitous ways. Then the heart of the holiday where my children and grandchild gathered in my house to exchange gifts. Around those bright moments are the shadows, the health, financial, and future concerns. I want to honor both the bright and the shadow. I want to explain how the shadows weigh on me, color my moods, and tug my attention off the bright. I want to hold the bright moments in my hands and show them to everyone “See how wonderful this is? Let me hold it over here against the shadow and adjust the light so you can see better.”

Every day of the holiday required adaptations for energy and for food. Howard is our primary cook because he has taken it as his personal mission to make sure that I have delicious things to eat despite my medically necessary elimination diet. Every day Howard pays attention to what we have in the fridge, whether I can eat it, how to make what I can eat be delicious. This interacts with Howard’s chronic fatigue and randomly appearing long covid issues. Standing in the kitchen can be exhausting for him. Cooking for me uses energy that he then doesn’t have available for other things. Most days I step in and act as sous chef, chopping, fetching, assisting. This practiced kitchen dance is joy and grief. Food is a delight and it is hard. Some days we are sad about what I can’t eat and what Howard can’t do. All of this is brought to the fore by the kindness of friends, colleagues, and neighbors who gift us delicious foods. A highlight was the gift basket sent by our book printer. Howard and I stood across the counter as I unwound, un-taped and released each food item from it’s display wrapping. I’d then read the ingredients and if I couldn’t have it I would push it across the counter to Howard instead. Howard accumulated a pile of crackers, cheeses, chocolates, and candies. The only item that stayed with me was a single-serving pouch of pickled asparagus. We laughed about it, finding the joke to ease the sting. Each gift of food was an act of love from people who have no way to know what I can and can’t eat. I am warmed and filled by the love, and each thing I can’t eat reminds me of the medical road I have ahead of me. Bright and shadow.

We didn’t do Christmas morning surprises this year, letting go of a tradition that our family has held for more than twenty-five years. Those surprises were a central focus and joy for Christmas for a long time. Howard and I planned them together, strategizing what to purchase and how to display them. Then we’d march the kids into the room on Christmas morning for the big reveal. Yet for the past few years the reveal has felt vaguely disappointing for everyone. I spent anxious energy trying to figure out how to make the reveal work. For the past few years, the kids (now adults) were good sports about trooping down the stairs to look at the display, but it was vaguely disappointing. I broached the idea of skipping the surprises carefully just after Thanksgiving. Checking to see if anyone would feel like the lack of them ruined Christmas. They all shrugged, and I was relieved. It was a logistical, financial, and emotional burden lifted. One less thing to organize. A relief. Then on Christmas morning there was no structure, no focus, no gathering. No line up, no march. People ate as they woke up and found quiet activities to keep themselves occupied until the planned gift exchange in the afternoon. It felt… empty? uncentered? And I was sad. It was not a sadness to be fixed, it was a final letting go of a role I held for a long time. My children are grown. Our holiday traditions are no longer about the management of over-excitement or teaching kindness and consideration, instead our holiday is a quieter event that focuses more on the individual connections and gathering.

Each year as I’m thinking about gift giving, I always watch for the gift that is a little bit silly, but will make everyone laugh. Shared laughter is an important component of the holiday. This year I found a $10 game at Walmart called “Let’s Hit Each Other with Fake Swords” since sword collecting is an interest for several of my kids, this was perfect. It was received exactly as I’d hoped. Much laughing.

In our discussion of ending Christmas Morning Surprises, Howard mentioned the stockings that go along with them. Mostly our stockings were filled with snack and treat food. I kind of wanted to continue giving treats, but I didn’t love the stockings themselves. Shoving boxes into a stretchy sock was never my preferred way to spend an hour. Howard nodded and said “we’re not really stocking people, we’re more loot crate people” and from there it was just a task of finding the right “crates.” We found collapsible boxes that can be used year after year. I got to fill them with small items and snacks. Everyone got socks and a logic or puzzle book. The loot crates were the final opening of the day and they were joyful. Each box had contents that made the recipient feel seen and loved. This includes Howard and me. I learned long ago to make sure that I also get to have silly, fun items that are just for fun.

My jigsaw puzzle table made an appearance on Christmas Eve and everyone had to step around it for our Nativity celebration that night and for Christmas dinner the next day. Having that puzzle gave me a pleasant thing to do while I was thinking thoughts of shifting traditions on Christmas morning. The complexity of my thoughts were brightened by the way that our nativity gathering the night before had followed our long-held tradition nearly exactly. They were darkened by the fact that coming years may change this tradition too. I don’t know what that quiet half hour with candles means to my kids, particularly the ones who have stepped away from the religion I still hold. For this year we sat in the dark around a wooden nativity pyramid with candles that make it spin. The grand baby watched with bright eyes from his high chair. Bright and dark. Continuity and change. Traditions are shaped to our needs, and we are shaped by holding them or letting them go.

Here I am now, on Boxing Day, looking at the remnants of the holiday, things which must be cleaned up and sorted. The launch of our holiday was disrupted by attending Dragonsteel Con and many of the decorations simply didn’t get put into place. The tree went up, but we never put ornaments on it. I look at it now, dark and bare wondering if that represents anything or if it is just a thing to put away and do differently next year. I’m not going to plan that “differently” yet. The coming year feels like it is going to create a lot of changes in our lives large and small. I can’t plan how traditions will play out next year until I’m settled into those changes.

The greatest gift for me in this holiday season was the grieving threaded through it and woven into it. I needed to be sad about the way some of my things currently are. I’ve been so busy I haven’t taken much time to sit with my sadness about what I don’t get to eat anymore. Howard and I both carry sadness about the days when he can’t do as much as he wants to. I needed to let go of long-held tradition so that in the process I could let go of assumptions about what my family needs. This is a thing I may need to do on a much larger scale, fundamentally changing how we approach our business and the assumed patterns for how our life goes. This holiday I needed to let myself be sad for the roles, patterns, and life that my family no longer has, because until I pass through that grief, and let it go, I will not be able to be joyful about what comes next.

I don’t know what comes next and that is scary. But whether it is bright, or dark, or both I want to be ready to find joy in it.

This week I hosted a family party in my home. Doing this always brings into full view the flaws in my home configuration and management. I long for a large space where cooking, eating, and sitting comfortably are simultaneously possible. This is not the space I have. My house is optimized for daily living rather than for group entertaining. Further, it is set up for the particular mix of individual people who live in my house and their adaptive needs. We have harsh bright lights for those who need bright light to see. We have multiple fridges for those who need separation to keep track of food. Things which most people hide neatly in drawers are instead hung on hooks. It is a house of compromises. It is also a house in transition. There are planned changes which will help make the house easier to switch into entertaining mode while also making it simpler for daily living. Most of those changes are waiting on time and resources that I don’t currently have.

It is so easy to be dissatisfied with my house. We had a party anyway. It was fine. If you don’t have the perfect container for the thing you want to hold, you use the container that will do the job. My house was good enough to hold this party. Food was supplied. A folding table was deployed. None of the people who had to say “excuse me” and slide around each other complained about it. Games and puzzles happened. Connections were renewed and gifts were exchanged.

My house is not what I wish it were, but it does the job well enough.

Today I planted milkweed seeds. They were sent to me by a local group that is trying to create native habitat for monarch butterflies. I had plans to prepare the ground, create a special bed, lay things out for beautiful growth. Instead I stole twenty minutes from the middle of the work day to scrape holes in the dirt between weeds. In my tromping to odd corners of my yard I saw how much work needs to be done to make my garden more beautiful. Work that I want to do, but today anxiety drove me inside because I need the income that working at my computer will bring.

I read a beautiful thread on Bluesky yesterday where Ace Tilton Ratcliff shared their day working in their Florida yard. It is a lyrical examination of hyper-local work to build the world we want to live in. It reminded me of important work that I have ahead of me, most of which is also necessarily local. The outcome of the recent election has made me even more uncertain about my finances and my future. It increases the urgency to improve and stabilize my income streams. It means I will need to pay attention and step up in support of others. I will need to expend energy advocating. Energy I can’t easily spare. I don’t know what is coming politically, financially, or socially and that frightens me.

But I know that spring will come. And some of the seeds that I scraped into the earth will sprout. And maybe next summer a butterfly will find a home where no space existed for it before.

It is an act of faith in the future to plant a seed. So I planted some seeds today.

All of September and October passed without a single blog post from me. That’s unprecedented in all the twenty years I’ve been writing this blog. Usually I get at least one or two posts per month. The big difference is that all of my available writing cycles are being spent on revisions to Structuring Life to Support Creativity. I have looming deadlines for sending the book to print and I have to work efficiently to make that happen. When I’m not revising SLSC, my time is pretty evenly split between the tasks of daily life, emotional support for my people, fretting over the looming US election, fretting over finances, and finally remodeling portions of my kitchen.

So far we’ve replaced one cabinet. I forgot to take a picture before we removed the existing cabinet, but here you can see the bare wall freshly painted.

Then we put up the new cabinets.

The doors are off because the way we have to lean over the counter to reach things means that the doors where hitting people in the face as we reached. We’ll need to buy hinges that open wider. Also the plan is to cut off that peninsula and turn it into an island. We’re months away from being able to do that. The next piece is removing and replacing the corner cabinet and moving the pot rack so that it hangs over the sink instead of dangling from the ceiling.

Remodel progress is slow and keeps being paused for other things. Blogging progress is slow because I’m writing a book as fast as I can. Yet slowing all the projects are moving forward.