Dear Kindreds 2023--#1

Tentatively, gingerly, maybe starting a morning practice

Dear Kindreds (yes, we’re back to that name. It feels like it fits.)

I have been struggling here on Substack (as my HUGE list of unfinished drafts attests), but I don’t want to spend too much time talking about it. The long and the short of it is that I had another Twitter thread go viral, which hurray! awesome! but people were mean on the Internet (stunning, I know) and because I tend to have a trauma response when that happens, I kind of shut in on myself a tiny bit and feel unable to share online, even here in this beautiful space I’ve carved out for myself (and all of us) it seems. And that’s okay. I’m building new neural networks, and safety comes with time and consistency, and because I set this space up as a place where anything goes, truly, I am able to release myself from the disappointment and frustration that sometimes accompanies writer’s block. (In this case I also have a lot to say about that Twitter event because the drama happened about a subject I think is very important—more on this another time perhaps (yes, there is a nearly-completed draft, why do you ask? ;-) ) but it contains a lot of anger and frustration and I haven’t gotten it to a place where sharing it feels constructive. So for now it waits.

Anyway, in an effort to do this work of rebuilding safety for myself here in this space (by which I mean the Internet) I have decided, because its simplicity keeps fear low and barrier of entry high, that here in the Driftless Letters I am going to try two practices that have really worked for me in in prior times to keep the creative juices flowing: Morning Pages (a concept by Julia Cameron in that one famous book she wrote about creativity whose title I can’t remember right now) and then something called zazen, which is an old practice that I learned form the book One Continuous Mistake by Gail Sher. (I absolutely do recommend both of these books, btw.)

Zazen, of course, is a type of meditation, but Sher transforms the concept into a writing exercise that my mind has always benefited from when things got clogged. The instructions of the exercise go like this:

Exercise—Writing Zazen

Write on the same subject every day for two weeks. Revisiting the same subject day after day will force you to exhaust stale, inauthentic, spurious thought patterns and dare you to enter into places of subtler more “fringe” knowing.”

And she’s right. The first time I really committed to this practice I spent weeks writing every day about a framed poster in my office containing a minerologie of precious stones, and I remember feeling stupid every single day, like “this is so boring, I’m just saying the same things again and again.” Yet when I reread it the other day, I was amazed at the ingenuity and originality it brought out of me—each day’s zazen felt new and fresh and interesting as I read it, even if it didn’t feel exactly so as I wrote it.

This time, I’ve chosen a subject instead of an object, and it’s actually the very first idea that came to my mind the very first time I did this, before indecision led to choosing the poster instead: synchronicity

Zazen Day 1: reflections on synchronicity

I have a special relationship with synchronicity.

Synchronicity is one of the principal ways the universe communicates to me. I’m trying to remember the first time I ever noticed it—the first time I ever saw a sequence of events in time and my mind registered, with that spiritual knowing: this has happened in a unique way; this repetition has significance; I am being spoken to.

Nothing comes up as I dig into childhood. Instead, I’ll talk about the synchronicity I experienced this morning.

I have been feeling sad about my family. Since my mom’s death, my family of origin feels fractured and I have felt quite alone, where once I felt a deep connection. There has been a lot of trauma that led to this feeling—since her death we have learned terrible, awful things that were taking place in the lives of some of my loved ones as I grew up that I was unaware of—and learning these things, combined with having lost my mom, combined with my dad remarrying, combined with divorcing Lolly, combined with a separation from the religion of my upbringing (Mormonism), has led to a feeling of upendedness, as if all I once knew has been shattered, leading my brain to unstitch the entire concept of what my childhood and family of origin even were.

This feels lonely.

This morning, I my heart was heavy with sadness about it. I do my best to choose thoughts that feel good in the morning, as the thoughts that we start the day with can really affect the energy and feel of a whole day, and we do have some control over the things we choose to focus on—yet, this morning, underneath the more positive thoughts, a really deep sadness about the “loss” of my family brooded. As I grabbed something from my office for my morning walk (I like to get as much morning sun as possible because it helps with sleep) I noticed the set of photos of loved ones who have passed on my shelf near my writing desk.

Seeing their faces in photos pricked my heart and made my longing for family connection even more pronounced. I could feel these forebears, but feeling them made me sad because they are all far away, and I miss the feeling of connection and belonging I once felt with my family of origin, with people still here on earth. I didn’t think much of this as I grabbed my jacket and went on my walk.

Recently (if you are one of my siblings reading this—pretty sure none of them do, but just in case—spoiler alert. Skip this paragraph!) I was going through my mom’s boxes in my garage, transferring her lifetime of belongings from flimsy cardboard boxes to more sturdy tubs. As I did this, I found an old sheet of return address stickers with her name and old address on them and felt inspired to send something to each of my siblings from my mom, complete with that return address. I stumbled on some cards, and put some cash in them, then got them ready. I could feel my mommy very strongly—that this was something she was doing, and not so much that I was doing (and really, this is something she would have done, and very much something I’d probably never think of). I envisaged getting a card in the mail myself with her return address and name, and with a card that said a few sentences and had some cash, and the feeling it would give me to know it was from her.

And because this is me we’re talking about, of course I’m still getting them ready to mail, because address collecting is hard and finishing things is also hard, but the point is, this morning as I was on my walk contending with those more difficult emotions underneath my appreciation of Northwest winter surrounding me, feeling so sad about not having family close, I found myself wishing I could send a card to myself from my mommy. I yearned to have a card show up for me that was from her, and that I knew was from her.

As I walked, something caught my eye on the ground.

I picked it up and was stunned to find a brand new card, still in its wrapping that had somehow been left right there on the sidewalk. I was amazed It was so clearly a response to this wish. For a moment I started thinking about walking up to the closest house and making sure it wasn’t theirs, but a voice in my head said no, Joshy, this card is for you. You need to take it home. It’s yours. And I could tell that not only was it “from” my mom, but it was also “from” all those relatives whose photos I had seen right before I left the house. I could feel their presence. I could sense them reaching out to me with love and care, in response to my outreach towards them.

It was a beautiful moment of synchronicity that I won’t soon forget. (Especially now that I’ve written it down!)
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That was fun to do. Tomorrow’s letter I will try my hand at Morning Pages (which I usually handwrite on big yellow legal pads—but we’ll see if it seems to work to type them here. The challenge will be to maintain the total, brutal openness in them that leads to creative flow). It will be important for me to be able to type, read once, then press publish—a flow of events that doesn’t take long, so I don’t get caught (as I have finishing this tonight!) worrying about photo uploads and such.

Write, read ones, press publish. Make the “publish” button my best friend. Allow myself to tolerate imperfection—a raw, unpolished product. This will be good for me.

Perhaps in my morning pages I will be able to update you all on the recent haps—and there are a lot of them and not all of them are great, but some of them are dang beautiful. And it’s all part of this messy, lovely LIFE thing we’re all busy participating in—and whatever the case, I’m happy to be a participant in it for as long as this earth lets me.

And I’m happy you are all participants in it as well. Thank you, genuinely, for reading my truly driftless, truly sporadic letters!

Love,

Joshua