Welcome to Bringing Fire To Earth! I’m so glad to see so many new readers—it means the world to me that you’re here. Welcome especially to people from the Effyverse, kindred art spirits that you are. This is a place to talk about how we take big ideas and make them happen, starting right now, and not waiting for Oprah or Taylor Swift or a fairy godmother (though I do love some good magic) to get us there. Sometimes the essays are passionate and sometimes they’re contemplative and sometimes they’re poems. Occasionally there are voice overs. Benches and Snacks is a project that got its genesis in an essay contest a few months back, and now I have a porch-equivalent where I sit out front and say hello to people. Apparently that makes it weird? If it makes the world better, I’m in. We are the ones who bring fire to earth. Welcome!
"It's hard to be an essayist if you don't write the damn essays." I was muttering this morning as I rolled out of bed, slightly grumpy. I did not. really. want to get out of bed.
I was doing coffee experiments yesterday, trying to learn about coffee for this novel I'm apparently writing, and that meant that I was up until 1:30 am. I don't drink coffee, see, but my character does and...
the things we do for writing.
I was going to tuck myself in the back yard, on the deck, but now here I am on the Benches and Snacks bench, scooted as deep as I can into the shadow of the eaves. The sun is up there but it is not here because of the arborvitae I planted in buckets and my hope is that the trees I have tucked around me here will also help, and so this very hot section of pavement has become inviting dappled shade which was the whole point. Well, except for the whole inviting neighbors into a kind of liminal space part, which does not happen this early. It would happen in Boston but this is the West Coast, and people rise later here, and begin more slowly. They will be along eventually but today is working up a great heat and I am not in favor. Ice, a cooler, water bottles...
I will probably want/need to build a snack table. I can see that the watering of the trees is at least getting things wet, with a little spillover but not too much, and the tree I fretted about for so long is leafing out. It casts a shadow now. I want to trim some of the dead branches but also, there are these beautiful spiderweb things happening that are almost certainly a result of complex insect control biome activity. I am falling deeply and profoundly in love with these plants, these right here.
Meanwhile, I should be mowing the lawn. Tomorrow is supposed to come in cool; maybe then.
The trouble with being a morning person is that there is a finite amount of proper morning, after the sun has at least begun to show its face and before noon, and I can only do so much. I want to write; I want to go for a walk; I want to tend the garden; I want to sleep more; I want to make bad colored pencil sketches for my own little satisfaction and nothing else.
But the magic of the morning only lasts a little; even if I have enough hours, I have enough liminal thinking for one, maybe two of those things. Usually writing gets primary billing, everything else has to work around it. Some days I can't think that hard, the insomnia was too deep or the anxiety is too high, and then I go walking.
And some days, like today, like now, I think I'm going to write one thing and I end up writing another, this quiet little piece about the sun and that little maple sapling that I need to transplant to somewhere, but every day I delay it grows both taller and more entwined with the peach tree it chose as its companion. Both of them need more space than they have, but I did the best I could in the moment. (I am constantly mulling if I can make it the Planter of Theseus, replacing one piece at a time until it is both bigger and sturdier, without the transplant shock another solution would incur.) (That doesn't address the maple tree, though.)
I am hoping the other piece, the one that woke me up and got me out of bed, will still join me when I finish this one. And then, I am informed, there should be a coffee adventure, because there was no cold brew set to steep last night, and the mowing I have already rescheduled and onward, a puttering sort of day.
Tomorrow maybe a walk, and a mow, and a different set of possibilities.
Today I am writing the damn essay.
Oh, and there goes the first person of the morning. It’s working.