Month: June 2022

I am a white person with long ancestral lines in the deep south. Though I haven’t done the genealogical work to confirm it, I’m 100% certain that I have ancestors who owned slaves here in the United States. I’m thinking about that on Juneteenth and pondering what I might owe. I do believe I owe something even though my ancestors were mostly poor or middle class and had no wealth to pass to me.

I don’t owe anything backward. I can’t make up for the past, particularly not events which happened before I was born. Instead I owe forward. I owe to the people of color who live in the world around me today and all the ones my life may touch in the future. I am responsible to use the privilege that I have, some of which comes to me by racist policies and systems, to make the world more fair.

Juneteenth is a celebration of freedom. It is a moment to reflect on how systems keep on rolling along unless people come along and spread the news “oh by the way, you’re free.” It is a moment for me to recommit to taking anti-racist actions in my life to change the world for the better. That is what I owe.

Shipping season is a familiar experience for all of us here at Chez Tayler. When the kids were little the experienced it as an influx of chicken nuggets and fast food. Now they’re my work crew so they experience it as work days …after which I buy them fast food. I don’t know how much longer I’ll have only my adult children on the payroll. A few of them are poised to launch into college classes and other jobs in ways that will make them unavailable to me. But for this time, it is only Taylers at the warehouse. I felt a little nostalgic about that possibility as I drove them over, as if this might be the end of an era. Which it might very well be. I don’t know what is coming. I don’t know that they’ll be available next time I hit shipping season. Which leads me to want to savor this experience a bit. (While also shipping packages out efficiently.)

I’ve spent some time thinking about past shipping seasons and the variations I’ve had for my crew of workers. The times when one or more of them was not in a good mental health place to work. The times when they didn’t know how to be good workers and they melted down mid-work in ways that made more work for me. I contrast those memories with what happened on Monday when, yes, two of my three workers hit mental break points (one depressive, one sensory over-stimulated) which caused them to need to stop working earlier than planned. But they were able to articulate the need, and they were able to manage it so that the impact to actual work completion was minimized to one less body in the assembly line rather than full disruption for crisis management. My kids have come a very long way and we all have better emotional coping skills than we used to.

I like working on shared projects with my kids. I like seeing them take ownership of their work station and optimize for not only their efficiency, but also to help the stations on either side of them also be efficient. Whatever comes next, it is nice to have this particular shipping season. We’ll ship things out again on Friday.

I was thinking this morning about why I’ve been posting less here on One Cobble, looking at my discernible behavior and trying to think on the reasons behind it. Some of it is definitely a lack of contemplative time. My life has filled up with tasks, commitments, and community connections. All of those things keep my brain very engaged with less time for thoughts to percolate. Yet I think the larger impact is the emphasis I’ve placed on community building in the past year. More of my thoughts are emerging in conversations and less in solitary writing. This makes me a little anxious because part of my brain believes that if I don’t pin words, thoughts, experiences down into writing they become lost. It isn’t true of course. Every conversation I have shapes who I am and who I am becoming whether I consciously remember the conversation or not. I don’t need to be a hoarder of my own experiences, making sure that every moment is pinned down and available for later access. Especially since the larger a hoard grows the less able I am to find anything in it. Unless I make some sort of an indexing system and I become a librarian of the hoard of my experiences. All of which sounds like a lot of work facing inward and backward.

Well that was a digression that almost feels like a story prompt. *Makes a note and returns to the blog post at hand*

I’m really loving the community building work. I love the instant feedback of it and the reciprocal nature of it. I strongly believe that building connections with other people is one of the best impulses humanity has. It is how we all thrive together. Yes it can also be how we injure each other or even destroy each other (I’ve ready the AITA reddit) but I only see people extricate themselves from toxic situations when they have some other connective thread to follow. The community I’m actively helping form right now is the one on our Discord server (which you can join here: https://discord.gg/XtTfJwcP The link will expire in 7 days, but if you come along later and would like an invite, use my contact page to ping me and I’ll get you a new link.) The Discord community is still finding its footing, but it has been a joy to interact with.

Another community that I’m actively building is the Writing Excuses Workshop and Retreat which sets sail on a cruise ship in September. There is a special magic in having a group of writers be literally all in the same boat. I have Covid worries about both of the big in-person events I’ll be doing later this year, but I also REALLY miss the community that I haven’t been able to see in person for years. I love being part of the structural work necessary to make this event happen. This year I’m the front line customer support person and I’ve really enjoyed digging in, finding answers, and solving problems.

In my efforts to write this post I’ve had multiple long conversations on Discord, a business meeting with Howard to discuss the priorities for today, three email exchanges, a scheduling conversation with one of my kids, and two googling distractions. …I think I might have figured out another reason I haven’t written as many blog posts. My life is rich and full of important / joyful things. I’ll take this existence over those emotional-processing-heavy first months of the pandemic. Even if it means fewer blog posts.

But I do want to do better about writing more blog posts.