Taking time off—like properly taking time off—over the holiday season has rejuvenated me in so many ways. I didn’t worry about what time I got up, or if I was meditating daily, or if I ‘did enough’ during the day. I slept for ten hours most nights, ate when I was hungry, napped when I was tired, and meditated if I wanted to. The four of us, Gretchen and my parents, who were here over Christmas, also spent a significant amount of time together reading.
When January 2nd arrived, I felt so full of energy. So powered up and ready to rekindle the dormant flames of ideas and projects that had died down through November and December. Not so much for everyone else, I found, until the second week of January. 2018 was a hard year for so many people—we all had a lot of rest to catch up on.
Now, 37 days into 2019, and I have been busy, but also doing what I can to inject that restfulness into each day. I’ve been working on relationship building and connections for cross-pollination on multiple projects—dharma workshops, classes and discussions; recording interviews for Everything is Workable; volunteering for my soon-to-start chaplaincy training. And then there are my personal projects: my Thangka line drawings, supporting collaborators for Love in Public, and writing.
Writing.
Writing has been so good. I have been making time to write almost every day. And proper time too, not just here and there if the mood takes me, but intentionally setting aside an entire morning or afternoon so I can work, uninterrupted for two or three hours at a time. There are the blog posts, and my Lojong commentaries, but I’ve also been visiting old fiction manuscripts. Most surprisingly, I started a new book—the first I’ve started in years, since I last participated in NaNoWriMo in 2016. I’ve only written a few pages thus far, but it feels good to imagine new characters into being and explore some of my fears about climate change in a fictional narrative.
The more challenging aspect of writing has been working on book reports. One of the requirements of my chaplaincy training is to write eight reports on books chosen from an extensive reading list. I have always struggled with an academic approach to writing. It feels so wooden to me, and restrictive. Each report has a set word count it must fit within, which is a challenge when writing about very rich material. It reminds me of when I was taking introductory psychology courses and the instruction was to argue for a side when I could clearly see that there was truth and insight in all aspects of a study.
Still, it’s helping me stretch my writing muscles and prioritise my time for writing in a way I haven’t done since I was a teenager. I remember when writing was something I did every day without struggle, because I loved it and the Internet was still new and social media wasn’t there to drain my attention. It’s how I had six completed manuscripts by the time I was twenty-one, and dozens of others at various stages of plot arcs and character development.
It also helps that I’m reading like I did as a kid—before our household got a television. Probably more-so, to be honest. I never tracked how many books I read when I was in elementary, but it probably wasn’t more than fifty a year. 37 days into 2019 and I’ve already read 15 books! Again, I’m prioritising it. This is my down time. Reading is the one thing I do that gives me immense pleasure and doesn’t make me feel ‘lazy’. It’s how I give myself breaks. It also helps that I’ve started giving myself permission to stop reading a book I’m not enjoying. Instead of forcing myself to get through a book over several weeks, I put it down and choose another. This also helps alleviate some of that sorrow I can feel knowing that I will die before I ever get to read every book I want to. *Laughs*
I’m making time for the books I want, letting go of the ones that are just not my style. But I am still challenging myself to expand the kinds of things I read. This year my goal is to read 90% books by women and transfolk, and 80% by Black/Indigenous/people of colour. This is not a difficult task in the slightest. It was early last year that I realised how very much the same stories are when they are consistently written by people who reflect dominant culture. As I’ve branched out, the stories I’m finding are far less derivative. They rarely have familiar tropes, if they have any tropes at all. They are rich and fascinating, new and exciting, and incredibly inspiring.
This too is probably why my writing is doing so well. Even the non-fiction I'm reading is helping with this. I no longer feel like my blogs are parroting the white Dharma narratives I’ve been fed since I started practicing in 2008. I’m learning how to express the queerness of my experience, as a non-binary woman, as someone who is gay, and more recently, as someone who is racially queer as well.
This is the power of stories, of connecting with voices that don’t get the biggest platforms or often, any platform at all. The more we can connect with the multiplicity of humanity, the more we can see our own, rich multiplicity and what it has to offer.
If you want to explore this with me, you can start with my reading recommendations from the books I read last year. These are examples of what I mean—of choosing new narrators and therefore, new narratives. Different narratives. Narratives that express the fullness of being human.