next to an actual nap or meditation, collecting my thoughts is the most restorative act of the day. it isn’t the sitting, the stopping, so much as the focusing of jumbling thoughts to a single moving point along the page. ideas flow through ink, scattered thoughts concentrate, funnelled through handwriting, distilling the chaos of the day into a line. like turning one’s attention to the breath, it is an organising gesture. one thing at a time.
the cue to write, as to meditate or nap, is a flailing, forgetful disorderliness. it may come on suddenly, a fractiousness, sometimes after a great sequence of activity immersed in the flow. the cue may be fatigue, anxiety, directionlessness. a notebook and pen in a pocket is the cure-all.
it isn’t strictly necessary even to sit, though the purring of small creatures is a welcome harmony. inevitably, someone will find the lap irresistible. dawn writing is accompanied by a cat. the afternoon variety, of previous years, has featured a kid goat, or several, which is only restful once all hooves and chins are organised and drifting off. goslings, ducklings, chicks. lap chickens. it’s a shared state of peace reminiscent of the quiet companionship of a milk-drunk baby. some approximation of silence is ideal.
to simply write out what’s done and orient to what we are about to do, is the manifest purpose. for those of us home based in work-life or life-learning, homeschooling or creative practice, in house-holding or small-holding, any method for clarifying and visualising next actionable steps is the heart of self-direction. it is the manual labour of self-organising. as skills go, it’s glaringly absent from most education.
my beloved notebooks are pocket-sized, blankness filling with inky lines, punctuated in margin and interstices with dots, arrows, underlines. a larger dot-grid notebook catches sketches, plans, checklists, designs, all pencilled in.
in a disorienting era demanding at once that we know our own thoughts and emotions, that we manage our days and the anxiety and fatigue inherent, and that we come up with inventive solutions, pausing to scribble our way to clarity is a lifeline.
in a moment when our capacity for enough stillness to connect with a deeper imagining of how we want to co-create a future that avoids collapse, a future premised on meeting the needs of all life, we need tools like this. to ruminate, to plan, to move into action and circle back into contemplation, testing our theories at a small scale, then as we see success, to replicate, distribute, to share what is working across communities, remixing according to diverse and changing needs. we need to be able to pause and think bigger, get clarity on the larger forces even as we translate new-and-ancient patterns into the tiniest and most intimate parts of our lives.
for me, variations on this practice are the scribble and the sketch, the slow contemplation, the quieter conversations, dialogues, thinking aloud together, maybe like this, in letters.
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this letter to you emerges as part of the scribblings, the films and the podcast, in the journal of small work*. thank you dear patrons, for supporting this small work.