Hi, loves. 🌿

Hello from the other side of last week

All my grand plans for the summer are sort of disintegrating. Are any of you experiencing this? Mine were: wake early to read, write, meditate, then swim at some point in the day. I have, actually, done a ton of reading (in the last two weeks mostly, more in links below), but the writing has not happened, nor has the meditation, nor has the getting up early, nor has the swimming, really.

Before the summer started, I asked my students to name one thing they wanted to do to hold onto their creative lives/selves over these warmer months, knowing that July and August often sort of evaporate if we don’t put a few stakes in the ground. The idea was not to get a ton done necessarily. The idea was just to have a vague intention, to not lose this part of ourselves to mothering or travel or beach time: read a lot of poetry, or sing with that out-of-tune guitar in the corner of the living room, or write by hand before everyone wakes up on the weekends. Whatever. I am not, as some of you know, particularly goal-oriented, so this was loose to begin with.

And yet. And yet! Still, none of it has happened, for me at least. I’ve been sleeping in later, rousing, for the first time ever, after everyone in my family; losing entire afternoons to lovely ice cream dates with friends; ignoring the computer or any writing goals I set for myself altogether. None of this is either bad or good, I tell myself: it’s just the inevitable rhythm of the summer. Maybe it’s needed, this loosening of everything: goals, schedules, intentions, accomplishment, forward momentum.

The latter feels especially meaningful. I had the idea that this summer would be my chance to get a handle on a bigger project I have been putting aside because of the constraints of my normal schedule. But instead I’ve enjoyed trying to be in the summer, and haven’t pushing myself or my work forward in some major (or minor!) way. I’ve not necessarily used my time well, as they say. (What is “well,” anyway?)

I thought of this notion of forward momentum yesterday morning, when I woke up at 5am and couldn’t go back to sleep. Noa was also up (!), so to help her go back to sleep, I sat in her room and meditated. (Sometimes a warm body nearby helps.) Sharon Salzberg was speaking about putting our attention on the breath. One day, she explained, early in her practice, feeling particularly stressed about being with each breath, she said to herself: you’re breathing anyway. In other words, relax. Stop making more of this than you need to! In my case: time is going to move forward anyway. Do I need to make something of it, all the time? Can’t I just live in it?

It makes me think so much, again, about how much we expect of ourselves and of each other. How every season somehow needs to be productive in some way, and how fundamentally opposed to this I am. One student and friend, when asked how she was going to use her creative juices this summer, declared that she would be hosting a dinner party every week, and I thought: bingo. That’s exactly the kind of out-of-the-box creativity and pleasure I’m seeking. (Have I done this? No, but have I hosted two birthday parties and a couple of dinner parties? Yes.)

Perhaps I was trying too hard to make the summer different, when the truth is that the summer simply is different, just maybe not in all the fantastical ways I’d imagined. Maybe my days weren’t as cordoned off from reality as I’d hoped — in my mind, they were going to look like I was at a writing retreat at an upstate New York cabin with no internet?? — but maybe they have been full of other things that do feel slightly different than the madness of the school year: a long-awaited trip to Montreal and New York, a slower pace at home, a few days with the kid away to spend with my husband, Modern Family every night with my own family, a few days of solid reading on the couch, sporadic coffee dates with friends in the middle of the day. I wonder if I can take this in, the difference of it, to feel its quiet and ease and oddness, to live it anyway, no matter if it’s what I expected or not.

Sending love,

Abs xx

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✨ FALL CREATIVE WRITING CLASSES! ✨

All of my weekly classes are full, but this fall I’m adding a monthly Sunday option for newcomers! It will be so much fun! Come explore for 2 hours a month. Info here. Early bird special still available for a few days!! (This will be your only chance to join classes this fall if you aren’t already enrolled.) DM me with any Qs!

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ALL THE THINGS

Here are the wonderful books I’ve been reading this summer: Daisy Alpert Florin’s My Last Innocent Year (out in February, but you can preorder!); Kathryn Schultz’s Lost & Found; and Amy Bloom’s In Love. Now I’m onto Alice Elliot Dark’s Fellowship Point and Alison Hart’s The Work Wife.

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I have finally added the option to pay for these directly on Substack! Woohoo! If you’ve been reading these for a while, please consider supporting me financially, too. (Art is, after all, work.) Or you can continue to pay via Patreon (see below). Thank you!