For the Birds: swift letters for busy people
#3: the broadest, softest definition of work
Thanks for reading For the Birds! You’re feeling especially busy these days, right? Let’s get right to it.
January brought blizzards—inches and inches of snow, and freezing rain, and ice storms (legit), and a healthy dose of cabin fever—to my corner of the Pacific Northwest. Mid-February, I find myself celebrating the joy of rugged surfaces, of not having to death-stare at the ground just to walk to my mailbox and back safely.
Grateful for the warmth of our little blue house, I’m thinking, too, about access, and the loss of such. I’m thinking about rigidity. I’m thinking about what gets frozen—sometimes for whole seasons at a time, which sometimes turn into whole years.
And I’m thinking, too, about the thawing.
I used to read it as a failure of my writing life—as a sign of my own disappointing constitution, or the flimsiness of my supposed devotion—that I couldn’t establish a daily writing practice. Except one day, in a compassionate moment, I got curious: maybe that’s just not my rhythm. If you sync up with it in right timing, like jumping into a game of Double Dutch, curiosity can be enough. Curiosity can be medicine. Curiosity can become confidence. Days turned into seasons, which turned into years, and I now feel zero drama about letting time pass without writing.
(Besides: I’m prolific! Despite these coy parenthesis, this is me practicing boasting, an assignment I gave to myself after noticing the ease with which other people call themselves experts on literally anything. If you quote me on something I’ve said today, make sure to mention it’s from the eighty-fucking-seventh issue of this newsletter.)
Allowing more flexible writing routines isn’t the same thing as “giving up” or justifying avoidance. This isn’t about wanting to do something, not being able to, and then saying, oh whatever, and pretending not to care.
This is about doing the work to get to know oneself, and the rhythms and pacing of your unique creative channel. It’s about getting to know your creative landscape so well that it starts to feel weird to compare your practices to anything other than your practices: your timing, your needs, your high and low tides. The cycle you come to recognize as your own.
What hurt the most during all those years of feeling like a failed writer was the way my expectations kept me from acknowledging all the work I was doing besides writing or not writing every day, all those subtle or mysterious or blatantly subconscious ways that creative labor can take place.
When I’m not writing but I’m walking through the cemetery and conjuring something that I’ll write about one day soon.
When I’m not writing but I’m listening to David Bowie and doing a puzzle and unknotting a sticky idea somewhere in the back of my mind.
When I’m not writing but I’m taking a shower and what is this phenomenon of all these good shower ideas, is it water-magic or something?
When I’m not writing but I’m marinating, the second most important kind of writing besides writing.
When I’m not writing but I’m living, and there’s a kind of writing, a kind of work, that’s happening then, too.
By “work” I mean “creative work.” What other kind is there?
I want a definition of work that accounts for all the work that can’t be measured or proven.
I want a definition of work that doesn’t pretend the invisible machinations of the heart are any less urgent or potent than the stuff from the brain that readily gets understood.
I want a definition of work that knows that daydreaming and night dreaming and intuiting are kinds of work, too, the kind that depend on slowness and privacy. The kind that don’t live on my resume.
I want a definition of work that lets me stop obsessing about what I’m doing or not doing and just get to the aliveness of my work already.
Briefly, I consulted a dictionary.
The dictionary was called, my body.
body /ˈbädē/ (noun) 1. vessel of truth.
example: she asked her body, “what counts?” and her body replied, “what doesn’t?”
I want the broadest, softest definition of work, the one that accounts for the creative labor of living. The creative work of being alive. This work we do, writers and not-writers alike, every single day.
Speaking of work…
Your creativity, before it exists for any other purpose, exists for you to experience. Let’s talk about this, and other radical ideas about creative freedom, on a 1:1 call.
I have spots open for clients who sign-up for a 3 or 6-month Creative Mentorship container, and I offer free hour-long consultations so we can get clear & excited about what working together will look like.
Reminder: The Resiliency Circle is happening this week!
Dear Paid Readers: Our first gathering of the year takes place this Thursday at 5:15pm PST. We’ll be chatting about Joan Didion’s short essay, “On Keeping a Notebook.” Details, extra resources, & Zoom link can be found here.
Another definition: Work is worship. Imagine if our tasks, our professions, were approached this way.
Work including the sacred. Work, as you wrote!, encompassing curiosity. Work being service to others. Work being sympatico with the Planet. Work embraced by art. Work that makes us better people.
87!