Month: November 2024

Today I planted milkweed seeds. They were sent to me by a local group that is trying to create native habitat for monarch butterflies. I had plans to prepare the ground, create a special bed, lay things out for beautiful growth. Instead I stole twenty minutes from the middle of the work day to scrape holes in the dirt between weeds. In my tromping to odd corners of my yard I saw how much work needs to be done to make my garden more beautiful. Work that I want to do, but today anxiety drove me inside because I need the income that working at my computer will bring.

I read a beautiful thread on Bluesky yesterday where Ace Tilton Ratcliff shared their day working in their Florida yard. It is a lyrical examination of hyper-local work to build the world we want to live in. It reminded me of important work that I have ahead of me, most of which is also necessarily local. The outcome of the recent election has made me even more uncertain about my finances and my future. It increases the urgency to improve and stabilize my income streams. It means I will need to pay attention and step up in support of others. I will need to expend energy advocating. Energy I can’t easily spare. I don’t know what is coming politically, financially, or socially and that frightens me.

But I know that spring will come. And some of the seeds that I scraped into the earth will sprout. And maybe next summer a butterfly will find a home where no space existed for it before.

It is an act of faith in the future to plant a seed. So I planted some seeds today.

All of September and October passed without a single blog post from me. That’s unprecedented in all the twenty years I’ve been writing this blog. Usually I get at least one or two posts per month. The big difference is that all of my available writing cycles are being spent on revisions to Structuring Life to Support Creativity. I have looming deadlines for sending the book to print and I have to work efficiently to make that happen. When I’m not revising SLSC, my time is pretty evenly split between the tasks of daily life, emotional support for my people, fretting over the looming US election, fretting over finances, and finally remodeling portions of my kitchen.

So far we’ve replaced one cabinet. I forgot to take a picture before we removed the existing cabinet, but here you can see the bare wall freshly painted.

Then we put up the new cabinets.

The doors are off because the way we have to lean over the counter to reach things means that the doors where hitting people in the face as we reached. We’ll need to buy hinges that open wider. Also the plan is to cut off that peninsula and turn it into an island. We’re months away from being able to do that. The next piece is removing and replacing the corner cabinet and moving the pot rack so that it hangs over the sink instead of dangling from the ceiling.

Remodel progress is slow and keeps being paused for other things. Blogging progress is slow because I’m writing a book as fast as I can. Yet slowing all the projects are moving forward.