Labor, Time, etc

I have forty minutes to write to you before I meet my mom for a labor day hike.

(Always a good way to start?!)
(Name the limitations, etc?)
(Everybody loves a potential punishment?!)

I have forty minutes to write to you before I meet my mom for a labor day hike.

Last week I was deep in a Laura Marling rinse, grateful for her helpful lens in proving that art is service, work. Neither greater nor less than, a thread in the weave.

I was also with my stepdaughter, with other family, pulled in all directions. With the constant hum of summer vacation, pretty much the only thing I managed to finish was writing that Minimal Change.

Tuit: I’ve never stretched a theme over two weeks, but perhaps it’s the best use of my next thirty six minutes / your next eight or so.

I have thirty five minutes to write to you before I meet my mom for a labor day hike.

(Lest, by the way, you think I’m lying about these time frames, have we ever discussed how quickly I type?)
(I type 160 words per minute)
(José and Becca often joke that when I type it sounds like when characters in cartoons fake type)
(It is consistently the weirdest fact about me, a vestige of my glorious dad giving his piano playing daughter Mavis Beacon at 8 instead of computer / video games)

Anyway. I have thirty four minutes to write to you before I meet my mom for a labor day hike.

(The more I type, the more I realize that what I’m thinking about through this piece is probably more important than a 40 minute stream of consciousness)
(But now I’ve gotten my ADHD brain hopped up on the dopamine challenge, so we’ll see where we end up)

Thirty three minutes.

The week was good, the week was glorious, the week was all consuming. Out of deep love and respect for my stepdaughter and the two very different homes in which she’s growing up, the details don’t feel appropriate to stream of consciousness document. But the overarching theme that persists whether she’s here or not is that I don’t know how to hold both my work and my family at once—cleanly, without guilt—without dropping either.

(If you have any tips, please send them my way!)

Because on my end, family usually feels like it needs the whole of me and then some. When it’s family I bring snacks and a sweater and Advil and listening and a baked pie and jokes and etc.

Thirty one minutes.

I am a gal who loves and values family/community (whether that’s blood or chosen) above all. A gift I’m grateful to receive, give and cultivate. But the very nature of the undivided focus family commands pulls me out of the slow, weird half-focus of creativity. The soft simmer, the sideways gaze, the little private hum that lets a line crawl out from under a rock. Family, to me, feels like eyes up and both hands. Art is eyes down and one hand on the thread.

(As if on cue, my glorious mom calls with a hike update)
(She wants to know if I got her text about where to meet [i did], and also [i deeply love this meticulous woman] wants me to know that her ETA has extended by two whole minutes)

Twenty nine minutes.

For what it’s worth, there are days when a call like that would completely end the creation I’m in, and there are days when it’s fine. And that's before we even get to the split brain situation most creative human beings have.

(Let’s head upstairs to that brain: two tenants on one lease, arguing over tempo)

A wild ass dance whose steps I’m still learning. Half my brain (hello! nice to meet you, I’m a record label president!) thrives on structure. Half my brain (hello! nice to meet you, I write songs!) completely doesn’t. The first half loves to wake up, make the exact same breakfast, have coffee in the same seat. The second half can appear to be rotting for four straight hours and then have an absolutely transcendent eight minutes. That brain often gives me ten perfect lines in the car on Route 209 and not a single one in front of the piano.

(Even in an absolutely perfect distraction free universe it would be a challenge to reconcile those two)

But we live in a current universe of cell phones and terrifying news and calendar pings at the exact moment a melody arrives.

Last week I wrote about theory, this week we’re talking practice. As I’ve said in many songwriting lessons/mentoring sessions, songwriting is simply… writing songs.

(José James calls)
(He just woke up, he’s in North Carolina)
(He wants to say I love you because that’s what he does when he first wakes up [help that is too vulnerable to type I am afraid you now hate me])

Writing is not theory. It is writing. I keep typing.

The 160 wpm thing can be a superpower, and it can be a trap. It tricks me into thinking I can outrun the need for quiet. That I can blitz a page and call it art. Sometimes this is true, but sometimes the work isn’t the typing. The work is the looking, the hearing, the returning to the sentence until it tells the truth. I can sprint the miles; the mountain remains the mountain.

Still, today, we write as exercise.

Twenty five minutes.

I keep thinking about Labor Day as I type. God bless the workers of our American past who pushed for unity, dignity, fair wages, etc. If you are a person who works the kind of job where you clock in, you may not see this post (I sure hope you’re not checking your email!) (I hope you are reading this on Tuesday!)

And for those of you who aren’t in the USA (hi! thanks for being here!) Labor Day is the American holiday meant to honor work. Here I am, on said holiday, both working and speaking on the invisible kind. The kind women have been performing forever with very little ceremony: mental load, emotional load, the keeping of calendars, the remembering of birthdays, the stitching of a household so it doesn’t unravel. Add art to that mix and I am doing … a lot of stitching.

(Thread in the weave sounding less metaphorical and more occupational at this point)

So if you’re reading this and it resonates at all, may I offer you a permission slip from the forest: My and your work counts even when it’s quiet. We do not need to bleed in public or wear fluorescent vests. We’re allowed to shut the door and call it labor. We’re allowed to say “I’m working” and let the room be uncomfortable for a minute.

Twenty minutes.

Proof of concept, a word I use often with the record label brain. I hadn’t considered it in creative practice, but here we are doing it together.

(Protect the window you have and make the thing)

Eighteen minutes. The bridge between those sentences didn’t really come, so I’m just… pretending it did.

If this weren’t a writing exercise that I created less than an hour ago I’d take a break here for a while. Go eat a sandwich, call a friend, drive to the PO Box. Today I am going to give myself five minutes for that break. My phone will time me, and, as god as my witness, in five minutes I will fracking figure out the point of this piece.

(Hi again!)
(I used the five minutes to put on workout clothes)

I think I’ll settle on the fact that writing this piece is the point.

(Balance isn’t a feeling, it’s a choice we keep remaking)
(One clean no, many failed nos)
(And practice, sometimes, is simply practicing)

Almost all my self alloted minutes have passed. Sometimes (more often than not) I don't find the perfect time for my work. I do my best and protect the imperfect time I have. Thanks for doing it with me today.

Ten minutes.

I will go on the hike. I may be five to ten minutes late. But I will have finished the paragraph that was trying to finish me, and I will be less sharp when my mom inevitably tries to set a brisker pace than my still healing from chronic illness lungs can accommodate.

(She is thirty or so years my senior and in about fifty times better shape even before my illness)

Shoes. Timer. Publish. See you on the other side of the hill.

(More next week)

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