Following the Energy

Forecast: High Vibes Incoming

HI!

Welcome back after summer break!  I enjoyed the heck outta my summer.  There is a balance between writing for enjoyment and the discipline of showing up to the page, and I intentionally took the summer off.  Write if the feeling strikes, or don’t. Whatever.  

Life isn’t supposed to be a constant grind, you know? 

I’ve tried to pay really close attention to where the energy felt good this summer. It's Joni Mitchell’s method of creative crop rotation. In 1980 she said,  “It’s a natural thing for me to rotate my creative crops when I’m dried up as a poet.”

After launching my first poetry book on June 6, 7 Years of Grief, I wanted to regroup and also focus on the kids. If you have school-aged children, the beginning of the summer is absolutely the greatest time to be a parent (and their first day back at school comes in at a close second place). You can give a lot of freedom to your kids who just want to LIVE and be UNBOTHERED.  You want to stay up late? YES! Ice cream in the pool? YES! Let's play video games and rot our brains! YES! Let’s go to camp! Let’s sleep outside!  Let’s pick up this snake! Dad is going to teach you how to play poker tonight!  Hot dogs for dinner again!

Summer can be a tricky bag of emotions for me though, as much as I don’t want it to be that way. My son died in July, so internally my body and my brain don’t really work for a couple days around that time. Thankfully, it's definitely not as intense as it used to be. In addition to “creative parenting” (AKA let your dudes be feral via purposeful expansion of your good parenting definition - it’s truly an art form, people), I wanted to give space to see if there was any other creative energy related to my grief, and there wasn't much happening there - YAY!  Creating something from my grief really did act as medicine for my partially dead soul. Like in The Princess Bride, I was only “mostly dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.” 

I liken the process of my grief to being a kid chest deep in a dirt hole digging to the other side of the world. For seven years I dug a hole all the way to the core of my grief and then popped out this summer on the other side. The other side of the world for me geographically is Port-aux-Français, Kerguelen, in the French Southern Territories in the Indian Ocean, according to the antipodes map https://www.geodatos.net/en . (If you need to pause here to find out what is on the opposite side of the earth from where you stand, go ahead…but please come back).  Port-aux-Francais is primarily a scientific research community, which energetically feels like my current destination.

So aside from my stellar “creative parenting,” there was some other creative crop rotation/research:

- I am painting (I have a 3rd, maybe 4th grade level esthetic going on) - the latest is a canvas of a dj controller painted with UV sensitive acrylic.  

-Attempting lyric writing (also very fun but probably like Ed Sheeran's first singing attempts).

This gives me hope. 

-Flower picking, arranging, and drying. 

-Float trips down the Truckee River. 

-Fly fishing, shore fishing, and kayak fishing.

 

-Bird watching and catching (my best rescues in the greenhouse this year were a green heron and a fledgling cardinal). 

-And lastly, one of my new favorite activities is being a roadie for my 14 year old son’s DJ business.  (I’d love to tell you all about DJ Bear - Instagram @DJ_Bear_Official sometime).  

Now the energy is turning back toward writing.  Victoria Erikson (Instagram @victoriaericksonwriter) taught me to follow the strongest energy, and it’s pushing back in that direction now.  Don't think about what to write, write about what you think.  So I’m power washing the mud off of my antipode shovel and writing with a couple women right now that I feel so lucky to write with. They are creative, funny, and Canadian.  All excellent qualities.  I’ve been working on a short story of revenge and murder which is unfolding nicely - or terribly if you are my semi-fictional character facing an imminent death). 

So overall, the vibes are higher over here, and I keep pushing them to get higher.  This fall I’m doing some deep subconscious work with Heidi Hazen (Instagram @heidihazen) to facilitate the next steps. The tunes lately have been a bit of Lincoln Jesser (he’s got a healing house music thing going on), some old R.E.M., and studying up on my Swedish House Mafia for Will Ferrell's Ultimate DJ House Party next month in Chicago with my date DJ Bear. The current wind-down activity is episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. My acquaintance Lex Read  has recently started @bandit_content and Lexistential on Substack and she is worth following if you are a creative type.  She was a huge influence on my grief navigation when Jordan died. Our apple orchard did well this year, and fingers-crossed there will be a small crop of saffron ready in a few weeks.  I’m back to clinical dentistry and it feels good. The sweetest puppy joined our family and it feels meant to be.  I’ll be back soon. 

Wishing you all high vibes,

Leann