It’s Spring Equinox today, the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere. Not a moment too soon. I decided to finally get on this quarterly newsletter, fresh with the spring seasonal plantings. If you’re receiving this newsletter, Happy Ostara to you! Happy Nowruz! May your astral new year begin with all the joy. Failure is Compost for Your New Spring Garden. Starting out the astral new year I’m coming out of the gate with a heavy-hitting letter about my list of failures. This last year was one epic chop and drop learning experience. While I know there is no such thing as failure, per se, I can’t help but feel like sometimes the circuitous route to a sliver of success can FEEL like failure after failure. I have to remind myself on the long days that it only feels like failure when I can’t see around the next bend and the sun hasn’t come out yet. But the sun will come out—it always does. The key is not fearing failure as it is part of the process. A key part of the process. Still, every spring during my review window I sit down and have a conversation with my failures. Failure and I go way back. We’re old pals. I hold their hair when they’re hurling in the John, and they hold my hand when I’m weeping in my cereal. We’re buds. We didn’t always have a great relationship--lots of judgy, complaining, bickering stand-offs. But over time, I began to realize failure was one of those unshakable companions that would never walk out on me. No matter how hard I tried to ditch the bitch, they always seemed to show up at the most incredibly defining moments in my life… margarita in hand. Consolation or celebration really just depends. I fail a lot. Like, a lot-a lot. And I’m not only okay with it, I find a great deal of satisfaction in the failure process. It keeps me humble. Okay, humbl-ish. It also keeps me oriented to priorities.
Most importantly, and I cannot stress this enough, failure is the compost from which I build my extravagant gardens. Without it, my creative soil would be nutrient deficient, my permaculture life design would be missing those critical enzymes, minerals, and building blocks from which all interdependent creative projects, my flora and fauna, need to grow strong, lusty and vibrant. The more I fail, the bigger I build. If you had a friend who holds your hand when you’re weeping AND generates a creative substrate from which to design worlds full of flowers, books, communities, and tribe—would you not love that friend and be grateful for them? Yes, failure is my friend, and I am proud to call them as much. Keeping in the garden vernacular, failure is the compost of process. Because I adore process design, workflow and strategy, I do regular reviews on my screwups. Where did I go wrong? What could I have done better? Why didn’t this work? This isn’t an inner party to bash Athena. I mean, in the early days, it felt a lot like self-flagellation and will sometimes slip that direction if I’m not paying attention. No. Now when I do my reviews it’s a step outside my own skin to look at things impersonally as I provide my inner self a bit of tender loving care, such as my favorite dinner, candles, and treats. I don’t think of it as babying, I think of it as—give the human woman a fucking break, while you bust her tits, yeah? Because that’s how I talk to my girlfriends, that’s how my failure meetings talk to me. Then I can be straight with myself. Then I can be honest. Then I can really see what needs to be accounted for, owned, released, or reconfigured. Meanwhile, I enjoy my favorite wine and some chocolate cake, then make lists of planning and improvements. Yes, I pour a second glass of wine for my friend, failure, and when we wrap up, I drink theirs too. I’m only human. It takes practice. Humanity has a poor track record with our failure relationship. Like any relationship it needs to be tended, looked after and appreciated. As a culture our fear of failure, judgement, and general shaming of imperfection is so cringe that we even cast aspersions on a beautiful rose with an uneven number of petals. Becoming a Connoisseur of Imperfection. Building my relationship with failure meant first and foremost I had to learn to separate my expectations of what is worthy of praise to me and my efforts, versus what is OTHERS’ worthiness of praise to their efforts. Also known as the game of “whose box am I in?” (Spoiler: you have to take a whiskey shot whenever you realize you’re in the wrong box.) Growing up in a world where ideas, information, influences, expectations, demands, judgements, CONTAINERS, from all spectrums come at you like buckshot, irrespective of context or appropriateness, value or need—it is overwhelming to say the least, and psychologically damaging, even deadly. I call this “The Wind.” The wind hits you in the face when you pop your head out of the container. The wind can also be circumstances, events or life flow that’s entirely out of your control. Does this wind make me stronger when I stand against it? Or does it blow me down? Does it swoosh me in the direction that feels right and natural and where I wish to go already? Or is it creating an obstacle that I should take heed of and move around or block? Then there are the containers. There’s much more about this section in my creativity workbook, but the gist is that our society is built on the premise of stackable containments which enables lower functioning thought paradigms to manage mass energy reserves toward an end goal, usually a hierarchy, but in place of that hierarchy could be profit, or God, or both masquerading as salvation or “right-ness” to the exclusion of anything outside the given containment protocol for mass farming of energetic population or labor. In this model you are either the profitable fruit, or the weed to be pulled. In this model, creativity and innovations are weeds—they directly compete with the structural harvesting of human potential and stackable labor matrices. Creative, inspired people are difficult to harvest, and systems run the risk of that creative energy infecting a contained labor force. Cost benefit analysis says, it’s better to lose the possible smaller creative boost by plucking out the weed that might destabilize a hierarchy with innovation. If you got your knickers twisted reading that, be assured, I personally don’t care. I don’t care who is at the top of which hierarchy, or which containment methods are used to farm your energetic population reserves. Free will by design. I’m a weed in the structural container paradigm—I just don’t fit anywhere in that profit model. Happily, so. But you do you and what makes you happy supporting your world view. If what you just read makes sense, keep an eye out for that workbook coming soon. The purpose of understanding wind and containers is to fundamentally recognize that in this framework as described above—perfection is unachievable and the reach for it is the most nefarious containment protocol ever invented. It is the impossible rotten carrot plated in platinum designed to be granted to the grand poohbah of achievement or specimen of noteworthy value, but will always be withheld because by law of the stackable containers, you can never be allowed to truly reach that moving target or the system will collapse. It is to stay in your container to be harvested, by either the promise of perfection or the fear of being punished for being imperfect. But don’t despair!! There is another way to get your carrot—a healthy, real carrot with nutrients and collaborative human exchange in an ethical and safe way. It’s risky, but it can be done. Be brave. Walk out of the casino. Yup. Just walk out. Stop playing craps at a table where the house makes the rules, and the odds are rigged. Start failing of your own magical accord, willingly. You were always going to fail—the containment method is BUILT to make you fail and feel like crap in the process, that is how containment protocol works. How is it designed to make you fail? By leveraging others to push, pull, or shame you back into line. To use toxic strategies to maintain your harvest value, and position of energetic investment into a protocol that will not allow you to “succeed” but thrives off the desperate attempts to do so. Worse, those who are capable of helping you be successful will withhold that help to keep you manageable or outside their competition range. The system gives out door prizes, though, so, YAY! CHOOSING to fail by exiting the containment areas in favor or your own agenda, gives you a completely different set of odds. Choosing to step beyond the containments that don’t support your goals, and working only with the winds that push you toward the vision you have for YOURSELF… well, then, you rebel, you.., now you’re a weed. And where do weeds grow? Anywhere they fucking desire. They seed on that wind. They grow in the cracks between the containers. They land in the most un-conditioned situations because they aren’t held back—and because they reached beyond their stations, ism, programming, socio-economic prospects, or education levels—those seeds find new areas to land and propagate. It might take forty tries to stick the landing. I might take a thousand gusts of wind. It could take a lifetime to find the perfect combination of chop and drop soil, and practiced cultivation but eventually you’ll land in the garden of your own design. Whatever that looks like for you. How you cultivate it thereafter is your own process, your own perma-system, your own reward. Becoming a connoisseur of imperfection allows you to find those other seeds. It allows you to recognize new layers of experience, beauty, and grace. It allows you to see the concept of the story, even around the author’s typos. It allows you to enjoy a meal, even with and maybe because of a little extra char. It opens up new world views, ideas, creative channels and possibilities when the imperfections become the goal, and discovery becomes the objective. Perfection, as it is idealized, has but one attainable path to happiness, if indeed perfection can even provide happiness. Yet, imperfection has infinite pathways to joy. Chop and drop away, my friends. Once I realized that OTHER people’s idea of perfection is just another stodgy container stacked miles from my end-goal, I redirected my expectations. Now, I aim for a margin within 10% of my landing zone while prioritizing the discovery experience. This is why I don’t fly jets or perform brain surgery. There’s a time and place for precision. My building methods are anything but precise. Story, and life, are imprecise by nature. Which is why I believe so many MFA writing programs create writers who struggle to tell stories and audiences struggle to read them. Story is messy because it’s modeled on life. Audiences struggle to accept or connect with anything that “appears too perfect” when related to stories and storytelling. I reason this is because it looks like a lie and competes with our inner perfection dialog for rational placement of hierarchy (to which we are conditioned) within a fictional framework. Perhaps I doth protest too much. I believe this is what my college creative writing professor, Melody Mackey, meant when she told me to drop out of college my freshman year. “If you stay in school, you’ll learn to write pretty sentences that no one will read. You’ll learn to create inside a box. Go live your life. Make as many mistakes as you can survive. Then when you’re ready to tell those stories, come back.” If that sounds familiar, it’s because Auntie Celeste tells Fable the same thing in Murder of Crows. Thank you, Mrs. Mackey! This echoes much of what my first mentor and creative writing teacher, Terry Folsom, said when I was stuck on a chapter. “Don’t worry about all the “comma diarrhea” or typos and spelling. You’re going to make mistakes and that’s okay. Your job is to create. Your job is to tell the story. It’s an editor’s job to clean it up and make it shine.” I have been extraordinarily lucky in teachers and mentors that have encouraged imperfection. Have I had the other kinds of teachers and feedback and nitpicking shamers? Totally. But do you know what’s funny? I can’t remember them anymore. There is no rental space for those left in my brain. All those containments were downed out by the phenomenal teachers who lead me down the path of joy to the spirit of story and discovery of self as a woman and a creative. I’m sure some other darker experiences were noticeable in the moment but they’ve since been tilled under by time and development. In the scheme of building a garden, only the advice of “reach”, “be imperfect”, “be true to you” are the phrases that landed and sprouted roses, peonies, lavender, and strawberries in my little creative universe. For this spring equinox progress review, I’ve come up with my fail columns; not-quite-on-target, ouch-epic-fail, and next-time-I’ll-try-this. Importantly, I also have a column for Holy shit! That actually worked! People ask how I build as fast as I do. One—I have no life. So, there’s that. Secondly, after years of participating in Nanowrimo, I learned to blast through the first draft, and even the second draft of any project or process without actively editing myself as I go, because I’ve learned it’s going to evolve six more times before the end anyway. Don’t put the polish on the silver until you’re done moving it around or you’ll introduce smears. This means I’m often on the third draft, just starting revisions while my companions are still on the first chapter of their first draft pretzeled with the fear of not being perfect on the first try. Plan to be imperfect, especially on the first try. Then the blocks, containments, and barriers fall away. You can always clean it up later, try again, re-target, and align. According to Mrs. Folsom, that’s what editors are for 😊 (can you tell I didn’t have an editor for this newsletter? Lol!) All that is to say, this spring, this new astral calendar start, I wish you all the beautiful bountiful beginnings of a year for growing your own creative garden. May your past flubs, mucks, flops, and fails become the mulch from which fecundity sprouts and abundance adorns your unique life. May the chop and drop of the past year facilitate a rich harvest for your future dreams. And may you befriend failure, that little tart, because as companions go, they do bring the best margaritas… and adventures.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorAthena lives and writes in the Siuslaw Forest, Oregon. Archives
March 2024
Categories
All
|