From the Spiral Notebook: A new to-do list

Hi all,

First, a couple announcements:

• The next Sidney library drop-in will be held on Saturday, November 2, at 2 pm. I’m looking forward to it! More information here.

• I will be doing a series of zoom workshops in January or February with Naramata Centre online. The dates haven’t been decided yet, but I’ll let you know as soon as I find out. I hope to write with some of you then too.

This newsletter is a little (okay, a month) late because I’ve been ridiculously busy. First I was on a week-long research trip in the Cariboo for a project I’m working on, and then there’s the poetry revision that seems never ending, and then I appear to have started a memoir. Why have I started a memoir now, when I’m so busy?

Gorgeous and slightly ominous sky in the Cariboo, taken when we just had to stop by the side of the road to look at the sky.

I’ve been writing Morning Pages à la Julia Cameron for a while, though mine are more Afternoon or even Evening Pages because I don’t do mornings if I can help it.

At first my Pages were full of thoughts, feelings, inner wonderings, but lately they’ve been all about what I have to do—what I should do first, and then second, what I need to finish this week and what can wait until next, wondering what I should hurry to complete as soon as I finish these darned Pages.

I don’t like how this makes me feel, like a tool for getting things done, an animate to-do list, a box waiting to be checked. Surely I am more than that.

How do I loose the reins of productivity from between my teeth? How do I become again a person who is, rather than one who only does?

Another gorgeous sky, this one at The Lake.

I will write myself a new list:

1. Turn off the lights. Sit in the dark, perhaps with my dog, when I can’t see to do anything. When I must sit still lest I stumble into furniture or stub my toe on the old rocking chair in the corner of the living room. Maybe then I’ll allow myself some space to just sit.

2. Pay attention to my dreams. Not the ones for my future, which are just another kind of impossible to-do list. I mean my sleeping dreams. Last night, for example, I dreamed I was one of three young women, perhaps in a high school club or class, making dresses from odd found materials (some kind of thin, springy tubing, an old wig). What does it mean that I, who have never finished a sewing project in my life, dreamt of this? What is a new dress made of caution tape a symbol of?

3. Go to the ocean. I live so close to that magic line between sea and land, and yet spend so little time there. I used to bring my writing down there sometimes, a towel to put over the moss on the little table, my notebook, extra cartridges for my pen. But I find when I’ve been there an hour I’ve gotten no work done, so I’ve started not to go. I write on the porch instead when I feel the need to be away from my desk, the porch where I am still getting stuff done. But maybe the point is that I wasn’t getting anything done at the beach. Maybe that’s why I should go.

This list doesn’t make it any less likely that I’ll be late with next month’s newsletter, I admit. Sorry.

FROM THE SPIRAL NOTEBOOK

I wrote this some other October (or more likely November). I don’t know if we’ll do jack-o’-lanterns this year. This poem may be as close as I get.

After Hallowe’en

the pumpkin my mum carved
with Emily Carr trees
in front of the moon
softens inwards

NOTES

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• And thanks, as always, for reading.

Yours,
Kelsey