The leaves are mostly gone from most of my trees. The red maple still has half its load to drop, but the blanket across the lawn is already thick and I need to rake it before the rain comes and flattens everything into a sodden lawn-killling mass. So I gear up and rake leaves into a giant pile. When the kids were younger they would jump in these piles. One year my son created raked leaf art by using different colors from different trees to outline pictures on the lawn. This year it is just me, the pull of the leaves against the rake and the shuffling, hushed sound of the leaves against each other. I don’t mind being alone with the leaves and the cool air. Not this year.

This years leaves have gorgeous colors. They don’t always. Some years the frost hits early and the leaves are brown before they hit the ground. This year shades of yellow, gold, orange, and red toss among the brown. I keep seeing leaves that are so beautiful I consider collecting them and attempting to preserve their color. Instead I take a few pictures and let them continue their cycle of usefulness rather than encasing them with chemistry. The beauty of leaves does not end when they fall from the tree. This pile will enrich the spot in my yard that I hope to turn into a garden. I carry the plan of that garden in my head. I have for years. Perhaps next year it will actually happen.

Sometimes I experience fall as a season of impending doom, because I know that the darkness of winter is coming. This year I’m finding joy in the harvest and the fall colors. I’m even relishing the melancholy feeling of watching the green fade away as plants preserve their energy for the winter. I think about life cycles and how retraction is part of the process of living. I think about how the leaves must fall in order to allow the tree to survive until spring. I don’t like some of these thoughts because they connect me to some of the griefs I carry, friends with terminal diagnoses, my aging parents, health challenges, all the hard things that no one wants to sign up for, but which come to us all eventually. The hard things are easier to carry when I can find beauty and necessity in them. I can’t always. Sometimes hard is just hard.

But not today. Today the fallen leaves are gorgeous and I have enough strength to get them moved from lawn to pile. I even take a moment to shuffle into the pile and lay down for a moment, feeling the prickle of the leaves as I stare up at the sky. It is wide and blue, full of bright contrast for the leaves that remain on the tree above me. Today there is beauty.

Yesterday I planted seeds. Literal ones in dirt that I turned over with a shovel. Hours of digging turned a weedy patch of grass

Into a patch of dirt

It doesn’t look like much. The edges are ragged. The stump in the middle is oddly shaped. (The stump was the reason the patch couldn’t be mowed.) It is just dirt.

But I sprinkled that dirt with seeds. The seeds don’t look like much either. They’re just specks that vanish the moment I sprinkle them. Yet those specks have the potential to grow into flowering plants. Digging the earth and scattering the seeds is an act of faith in the future. A gift to my future self. She will get to enjoy flowers while now I just get to feel tired and dirty. And accomplished. I’ve been intending this garden ever since we built our pandemic patio and had to chop down our dying walnut tree. Five years I’ve carried this idea in my head. Now it is begun.

This garden has more work ahead of it. Future me will need to create defined edges and set it up so that the garden bed and surrounding lawn are kept separate. Over the next several months I’ll get to see which of the seeds actually sprout and where my scattering left bare patches. I may need to thin out some plants where seeds clumped together. But I did the groundwork today which makes future work possible.

There are other areas of my life where I am metaphorically doing groundwork and scattering seeds for the future. I live in a brain that is constantly watchful for conditions and trends. I read headlines and spin ten possible futures fully rendered with alarm klaxons and lists for how I should prepare. But all of that is reactive, as if I have no guiding hand in what the future will bring. And, true, my ability to control large scale events is small-to-nothing. I can’t roll back climate change, or restore a just-bulldozed historical treasure, or fix uncountable inhumane treatments of people, but I am not completely powerless. I can lay small, local groundwork for a future I want to have instead of just trying to survive what comes at me.

In eight months my patch of dirt may be gloriously abloom, or it may be a mess of re-growing grass and dirt. But the work I did means that flowers are possible when they weren’t possible before. A small patch of flowers doesn’t fix the world, but it might mean everything to a bee. It makes something better and more beautiful. Something is better than nothing.

The memory of grapes stabbed me with anxiety this morning. Considering the round squishiness of grapes, stabbing isn’t something that comes naturally to them. Unfortunately anxiety is expert at stabbing with adrenaline spikes, which is what happened this morning. Anxiety stabbed before I was even fully awake and all at once I remembered that there are still grapes on my vines, that I’ve been intending to turn them into juice, that I’ve been too busy, that all of my days are tetrised together with tasks, that grapes are not the only tasks I’ve failed to accomplish this week. Then anxiety helpfully supplied a list of all my failures and how those failures will inevitably lead to my doom.

Anxiety is no respecter of sleep, nor of the fact that on Sunday mornings I deliberately delay my alarm to allow the morning to be slower.

I am (Fortunately? Unfortunately?) very familiar with this sort of anxiety stab, and so instead of hopping on board with the anxiety, I counter with grounding in today. None of those terrible outcomes have happened yet. I’m fine today. Thank you for that list, I can use it when I’m prioritizing tasks for the week. (Sometimes things become priorities for anxiety prevention as well as because of deadline urgency.) Remember today’s plan. Stick to the plan, including the scheduled time when I consider tomorrow’s plan. Breathe to try to calm the adrenaline out of my physical form. Then get up and go do something else, because laying in bed is also laying still in the stew of anxiety.

Today’s plan already included grapes. That’s why they were on my mind and why I had already photographed them. I will not allow anxiety’s attempted hijack ruin my day.

The first completion was Gen Con in August. That was a huge and complex project that lived in my brain for nine months. The completion of Gen Con was followed by the completion of Worldcon, Writing Excuses Recording, and sending Structuring Life to Support Creativity off to print. Each thing concluded gave me space to complete something else, rather like a debt consolidation plan where paying off one debt frees up funds to pay off the next debt faster.

One lingering project that I finally concluded last week was my collected book of blog and journal entries for 2024. While putting the finishing touches on it, I re-discovered the priorities I set myself at the beginning of 2025. I’d forgotten them.

• Entrench
• Grow
• Complete

I say I forgot them because I had forgotten those specific words and I never used them to bring myself back to task, but as I’m looking at the past three fourths of a year, those words are completely accurate to how I spent my time. Especially “complete.” 2025 has been a year of completion. And I’m not done yet. I’ve completed so many things this year and I can feel the acceleration in completion.

• This week I’ll complete the shipping for Mandatory Failure
• The week after I’ll complete the warehouse reorganization.
• By December I’ll be delivering Structuring Life to Support Creativity in all formats.

With the acceleration, I discover that I don’t want to fill up the space in my life with grand new projects. I want quite projects and a sustainable creative life. I have begun an effort to build up my Patreon, but that doesn’t feel grand and new, it feels like continuing an effort I’ve long delayed. I am deliberately choosing deliverables that help me create the life I want to be living rather than projects that represent a big stretch for me.

Completion opens up space. In that space I get to choose what comes next. I am trying to choose my “next” based on hope instead of fear. I am also making sure I pause long enough to enjoy this moment in my life when I am happily working and completing things instead of being buried in an avalanche of urgent responsibility. I hope I get to just quietly continue. At least through the end of the year.

One of our current efforts is to eliminate plastics out of our food preparation and storage. Howard did a bunch of reading on the effects of microplastics, particularly the interactions between chronic fatigue, long covid, and microplastics. The science is not clear, but switching our food containers is a small change and if it helps, why not? We definitely needed to switch out our plastic cutting boards. They were aging and had begun visibly shedding plastic fragments every time we used them. In an effort not to replace old plastic with new plastic, Howard acquired some stainless steel cutting boards. I don’t like using them. The sound of the metal knife on a metal cutting board sends bad sensations up my arm. So I did a small splurge and bought a set of acacia wood cutting boards.

I’ve always found the textures and colors of stained wood to be beautiful. I love how wood was grown instead of made. Every time I use this board I am pleased with how it feels in my hands, how it looks to my eye, and how it functions as part of my food preparation. Life is full of tools for necessary tasks. Selecting them to provide a small joy instead of a small annoyance improves my daily experience. It gives me a small lift instead of a small drain. I need every lift I can get.

One of the things I love about road trips is the way it shuts out so much of the noise of daily life. There is a clear and simple objective, to travel safely to the destination. Everything else waits until we arrive. Even when we’re posting to social media or checking in on email, there is a distance between me and my usual online existence. Road trips force a focus on the needs of the moment, they ground me in Now. So I was surprised when driving south on I-15 that I was constantly bouncing through fragments of memory. It is a road that I frequently traveled in other eras of my life, and apparently in those past trips I’d seeded memory along the road to be re-discovered on this one.

I found myself thinking of the many trips I’d taken to and from Cedar City while one of my kids went to college there. The stops I made at local attractions during those years where I learned local history. The times one of my other kids rode with me because long drives pulled him out of depression and we were able to talk. The time I parked on this road in stalled traffic on a snowy Thanksgiving weekend while the plows tried to clear the road ahead. The events are fragmentary and most of them don’t have a fixed location I can name. I just have “This stretch of road looks like that one time when…”  

Memory comes with emotion. Somehow the hard emotions are stickier than the happy ones. Even when I don’t have a concrete memory to recall, some stretches of road had layers of feeling for me to discover.

Howard was my companion on this trip and he was untroubled by the landscape of memory which I encountered. I did my best to not fill the air with musings about the fragments of feeling and memory I encountered. Sometimes I shared if there was a specific story to tell. Mostly there wasn’t much point in pulling Howard out of his pleasant road trip to express a vague memory of stress associated with a particular curve in the road.

As we traveled I wondered why the hard memories lingered. I know that many of the trips along the road were joyful. I sometimes wrote stories or blog posts in my head while in transit. I enjoyed learning local history. We traveled this road once to see an Annular Eclipse, a fun day trip. Perhaps I held the happy moments close and carried them home with me instead of leaving them scattered by the roadside like litter.

Driving through, did seem to do some sort of clean up, because on the return trip I did not spend so much time haunted by memories. Of course the return trip was its own adventure.  It is harder to be contemplative about the past when confronted with current events that need action.

So now I have a midnight blown tire complete with overnight hotel and finding a tire store the next morning as part of my experience of the road. All things considered we had the most convenient possible roadside emergency. We were right by an exit with a well-lit gas station and a hotel with a vacancy.

Part of me wants to travel the road again for the specific purpose of collecting and exploring all of those memories. I’d like to Walk the Spiral again. But at this moment in time wandering through memory is going to be set aside in favor of moving forward. I have so many things I want to do, and I need to focus my attention on those.

The trip was good. We traveled to Los Angeles for the Writing Excuses recording camp. We returned safely having safely traveled 1300 miles of road and memory. Time for me to put away road trip thoughts and be at home.

I woke up with a head full of worry about the world and the future, so I got out of bed instead of stewing in it. The light outside the window felt like pre-dawn because cloud cover softened the 8am light. No one else was awake, so I moved freely through my thoughts and spaces undisturbed. I have nothing on the calendar for today. Today’s task list is similarly sparse. The urgency of summer conventions is gone, and I hit my book deadline, which means today is unassigned. I have not pre-planned my efforts by hour. Instead I can wander and consider what to do.

I want to work on sanding cabinets.

I have only a couple of months left before the weather is too cold for stain and varnish in my unheated garage. I need to get these finished so that they are ready for installation as soon as I can line up both a work crew and enough money to pay for a work crew. Odds are strong I can make that happen in the spring. But that thought path leads back to the thoughts which I tried to escape, so instead I look ahead to the work of today: sanding.

I step outside to breathe morning air. The first signs of fall are beginning. Soon all the green leaves on the trees will be as golden and as discarded as this one. A precursor of things to come.

Fall is gorgeous, but after that is winter with bare trees, not enough light, and cold. Winter is sometimes hard on me. I look at this lone golden leaf and my mind wants to rush ahead to all the hard things to come. Instead I turn to look at all the things which are still green. It is too early to mourn the lack of green when I am still surrounded by it. If I rush ahead to mourning, I’ll miss the green today.

A beautiful dandelion puff stands tall over my lawn space. I pause to admire it for a moment.

Then I take a closer look at my clover. I’m loving the developing biodiversity of what used to just be turf grass.

One of the things I could do today is scatter more seeds. Fall is a good gardening season. Any effort I can put in before the weather gets cold will reap benefits next spring, and all the years after.

I step closer to my grape vines and discover that I’ve currently got some reaping to do. The grapes are ripe.

For the first September in a long time, I don’t have a big trip across the middle of the month. (I have a small trip at the end of the month, but it doesn’t require much prep.) This means I might be able to harvest and process grape juice this year. That might lead to grape jelly. I still have an abundance of raisins from past years, but I might make some of those too.

And now I see the pattern in my morning. All of my things are showing me how today’s work is connected to what came before and what came next. I can’t change the past. I can’t control the future. Yet the choices I make today are dependent on the past and create the choices I’ll have available in the future. If I get the cabinets stained, I have the option to install them midwinter, or next spring, or whenever I have funds. If I process grapes into juice I can choose when to drink it or serve it to friends. If I scatter seeds, some of them may grow and I have flowers in my future. The work of today is to take actions that create paths toward choices that I want.

The other day I was carrying groceries up my walk when I glanced over at my front lawn space. The glance became a pause because I realized that while I was not looking one of my projects succeeded. My lawn is now more clover than grass.

At least it is in the areas where I scattered clover seed three years ago. ( Previous posts: “The Hope of Clover” “Growing for the Future” “The Greening“)

I need to pause and admire this clover in all the places it is growing. It blooms every week between mowings. Yes I have lots more lawn where I need to sow clover. Yes clover is only a tiny step forward on the path toward re-wilding my green spaces so they’re more water-wise and native wildlife friendly. I can see exactly how much more there is to do. But today I have clover. I remember the entire year after I first threw clover seed when none of it sprouted. I remember when I had to go hunting to find any clover at all. Now it is everywhere and spreading.

So I pause, and admire the clover. Then I buy more seed because the only way it is better three years from now is if I scatter seed this fall.

Absence goes unnoticed. There are exceptions of course, when the absent thing or person is something we consciously seek, but mostly when things (or people) are absent, they drop from attention and memory. It is when they return that I think “Oh! I’ve been missing that.” This is an observation about this blog you are reading, which I’ve apparently not posted to since February. It as also about Worldcon, which I attended this weekend for the first time since 2011.

On Worldcon:

I’m unsure how it is been more than a decade since I last attended a Worldcon. I am surprised by how wonderfully connected I felt in returning. My professional friendships have long been in the mode of lightly keeping in touch via social media, interspersed with catching up at events. My friendships are deep in years even when sparse in hours spent together. I was at Worldcon for three and a half days and there was not enough time to visit with all of the people I wanted to see.

My weekend was conversation and community. It was people choosing to come to where we were in order to spare Howard a few blocks of walking. Over and again I was astonished by the gifts of care, time, and attention from other people. I am home again now and I carry memories and photos to assist in remembering. I also have plans to be less absent, to do a better job of noticing when someone goes absent, and ongoing thoughts about the reasons and consequences of absence.

On this blog:

My hiatus was unintentional. The stories I used to tell here got re-purposed for newsletters, Patreon posts, and updates on crowdfunded projects. I threw most of my spare writing energy into crafting my non-fiction book.  I can see exactly where my energy went instead of writing blog posts. I understand why I made those choices. Yet I’m still surprised that I’ve gone half a year between posts. Time slips through my fingers.

Planning less absence:

I am turning over in my mind how I can restructure so that I don’t go absent without noticing.  The thoughts are half formed an slippery because I am swimming in fatigue. I was fully present to people and friendships for four days when only a week prior I spent five days being present for people and events at Gen Con. Of the past fifteen hours I’ve been asleep for 13 of them.

I am looking forward to unpacking my suitcases, and my plans, and my pictures, and my thoughts. Hopefully I can arrange them into something for sharing.  

“Don‘t let fear for tomorrow steal today’s joy.”

I said it first to myself, a chant to push back on the anxiety that always lurks in my mind. Then I said it out loud to others, in person, on the internet, because I hoped the thought could help others as well as me. Saying the words is only the beginning of course. Following through is always harder than intention. And it is difficult to not become a hypocrite when I stand in the middle of all of my things and none of them seem to have joy attached. This is what oppression, depression, and fatigue do to our brains. We can hold joy in our hands and it feels like gray dust. So I am learning to blow off the gray just and find the tiny shining nuggets to put into my pockets. It is a deliberate practice rescuing joy from fear. It requires me to remember that hope doesn’t always arrive as and emotional uplift which lightens all we carry. Sometimes hope is expressed as the next painful step in a long slog. Joy is not always shiny and eye catching, sometimes it is quite ordinary. Seeds are very ordinary, often ugly, but if tended they grow into something much bigger and more glorious. Here are the things I am doing to gather the seeds of joy and to give them space to grow.

• Daily thoughtful study for at least a few minutes at the beginning of my day. This includes scripture reading, prayer, and sampling from at least one other book that invites me to think big thoughts. Right now I’m bouncing between Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Repentence and Repair by Danya Rutenberg, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear by Mosab Abu Toha, and Phoenix Rising by James Goldberg.
• Putting writing at the beginning of my day. Giving myself the chance to work on Structuring Life to Support Creativity, or a blog post, or a private journal entry before the endless admin and demands of the day take over all my hours.
• My morning yoga practice is currently on hold while my injured shoulder heals, but I plan to return to it. These three morning things together sometimes take half an hour, other times an hour and a half. The days where I let them take longer tend to be calmer and more joyful.
• Regular service to my house and the people inside it. This most frequently means that I’m the one cleaning up the kitchen and dishes after four ADHD adults have once again created chaos while feeding themselves. Yes our house would benefit from better balance in who cleans up the mess, but this small act of creating order out of chaos makes the world around me visibly better, and that is a good thing.
• I watch for birds. The past few days I’ve been writing down the first bird I see each day. Writing it down gives “looking for birds” and importance that causes me to slow down and watch the world when I’m out in it.
• I’ve picked a few areas for my activism focus. Things I plan to pay attention to and spend energy on. My current focus is pushing back on book banning and anti-trans legislation in my home state of Utah. I am trusting that other people will take on the plethora of other things which also need to be defended against. Because I can’t to it all by myself and if I try, I will burn out.
• I avoid the news that wants to grab me with panic-inducing headlines. This includes when online friends are panic posting about whatever awful thing happened today and which is making them scared. I’ve selected a few news sources that are deliberate and researched. I check in on those in the afternoon sometime so that I am not oblivious. When there is news directly affecting my personal interests or my areas of activism, I may dig deeper and read entire articles. Mostly though, I’m scanning enough to have a sense of what is going on, then returning to the work of the day.
• When I take actions, I am not broadcasting them on the internet unless that broadcast serves in direct support of the action I’m taking.
• I keep my to do lists and get the tasks on them done so that my family has resources, so that my business continues, so that my customers are served, so that I’m honoring my freelance contracts. Doing the work of the day pushes back on despair. It is an assertion of hope that these tasks matter, that I’ll get to make more books in the future, that the world will continue.
• In the evenings Howard and I sit together and watch shows. On the surface this may look like a waste of time, hours in front of the TV. But it serves us. It occupies our minds while our bodies rest, which is particularly important for Howard with his long covid. It also rests our minds because it turns our thoughts away from work and from anxiety. We’re “commentary while watching” people, so the experience is interactive as we critique creative choices in writing, editing, or performance. We laugh together. And we settle into a calmer and more regulated state after the affairs of the day.
• While watching TV I do sudoku and embroidery kits. Both of these are simple activities which engage my brain and my hands. They have small moments of satisfaction when I complete a puzzle or when the stitches look pretty. Neither is in any way productive toward my career or income. They exist in my life as hobbies. If I stop enjoying them, I will abandon them for something else.
• By the end of February I will get to start looking for the first spring flowers.
• I should probably start going for walks in my neighborhood again.

Some of these things don’t feel much like joy when I am doing them. Lots of them feel like work. Right now I’m spending lots of energy just to keep anxiety from crushing me. Some nights anxiety stabs me with bursts of adrenaline and for a few minutes I feel like doom is imminent. That is when I turn on Anna Nalick’s Breathe 2am and remember how to hold still. Yet the combination of all of these things make space for joy to grow. They also move me toward the life I want to be living. Sometimes hope is persistence. Sometimes reaching for joy is sitting pouring water on dirt and trusting something will sprout soon.