The Writing Life? Is This Happening?

I still find it hard to believe: How the delicate strings that held my life together just snapped and everything changed. This blog space has been sitting here for three years untouched. I've been writing that whole time, but in journals or word docs, reading at poetry readings or submitting little bits and pieces to the local weekly or literary journals.

But, in November 2014, my life was turned upside down after it was engulfed in flames and thrown over a cliff. There was no escaping the fact that I would lose everything: two businesses, a house, an unbroken family. How that all went down is too deep of a tale to tell now, but my wife left me and it was a painful enough experience to reset all my thoughts and feelings on life, love, and success. I could liken it to shutting down a computer that's running too many apps at once, when everything starts to freeze so you just turn it off. And after fifteen seconds you turn it back on again, reset. They call it a hard reset right? My mind, psyche, and emotional body did that.

I had a year of living with virtually no income. Maybe $600 every month. That was the year I handed off my cafe and the income it provided to my ex wife. I stopped eating out, I stopped paying the mortgage, I cancelled stuff, turned out the lights, I routinely spent $50 for a week's groceries for my boys and I. My mother taught me how to do this by example in her hard years of selling her handwoven rugs at craft shows. She helped me a lot too. Mom would slip me some money here and there or bring me ten persimmons she gleaned. She doesn't need to but she still gleans, because free people like her glean. My maternal family's Hard Wintering Great Depression Mennonite FDR Democratic Socialist hardiness is in my DNA, thank God. 

Winco, Grocery Outlet and Heartseed Farms saved my life last year. Winco is a worker-owned coop, and Grocery Outlet is a locally owned franchise. Heartseed Farms was an intentional community of organic farmers that traded me coffee for a weekly CSA box of the finest fruits and vegetables. With this team as my life support system I remembered that most people are in poverty and don't own two businesses. Turns out visiting poverty is no big deal for me. It was like seeing that great uncle who brings humble treats like dum-dum pops and hands them out to all the kids with his huge battered hand holding them all, the hand missing fingers from the harvest accident involving a combine. That's what poverty is to me, familiar, genetically familiar. Many people are scared of poverty because he's big and strong and scarred up, but he carries a lot of warmth, is always honest, always looks you in the eye, and has no tolerance for bull shit or phony smiles. In a lot of ways I missed poverty.

So the point of this post is that in my poverty, in the losing everything, I was given the opportunity to think freely about what I want to do now. This is an amazing opportunity. I also learned how little I need to be really happy and healthy. Since I was a wee boy I've wanted to make a writing life. I've wanted to sell books, books of poems, manuals, letters, scripts, ebooks, all of it. If I had executed half of the writing ideas I've had over the last ten years, well scratch that, I wasn't ready to do any of it then. Not well anyway. That's the truth. I was too busy playing too many roles, but it was good practice.

So then, a miraculous thing happened: I admitted to myself that I don't want to work hard not writing, I only want to work hard at writing. I like to work, love working even, anyone who knows me knows that I like work. Making food or coffee, or anything with my hands, is a necessary ingredient to my happiness. There is so much peace in using my trade, just not for 40 hours every week. That's too much time taken away from writing projects. The businesses I lost were my means to an end anyway. A wise man once told me, "Just go do the end you're looking for, skip the means."

So now I get it, and I'm doing that. I had to lose everything I was afraid of losing to have enough courage to do that, but now I'm doing that. Plus, being in love with Sadie Rose, a writer, has given me a valuable peek behind the curtain. I've been so inspired by how she makes it all work for herself, how she keeps herself writing for pay. Watching her has been a big eye opener and very inspiring.   

And then freaky things happened, some writing jobs came: A manual, a business consult, a biography that needs to be written. It's stacking up, unfolding just like that. I see a pathway to where I need to go. I'm not trippin on money, because I have such a smaller use for money than I used to and I'll always work my trade when I need it. I'll never get paid writing poems of course, unless I make books and sell them myself out of a backpack. But that's really fun! So I'm good. I'll make books and sell them out of a backpack.

I'll write for whoever needs me to write. 

I started up this blog again as a journal space primarily, and as a spot to try out a poem or two (I usually test run them at The Bookstore poetry readings), and as a place to rant and opine and advocate about things you may or may not care about. Really, this is all a big experiment to see how long I can make a living just being me and creating. Whatever happens, I'm pretty sure I won't get bored.  

If you need a writer, for business or pleasure, get a hold of me. Otherwise, I'll let you know when I'm selling those books of poems out of my backpack.