20 July 2011

Let me officially designate myself here as "unstuck" now. The RV is in my driveway - a little rental in Phoenix with a fantastic landlord who allows us to build whatever we desire and grow our own food (including animals if we'd like) in the backyard. We've been here about five months and are fairly settled in. I've begun to put on monthly salons and although the specifics of the vision have changed - no longer on the road with the Abundance Tree - the core of the vision remains the same.

The Abundance Tree will live on in this small neighborhood for now. And the RV will find a new life - as what? I'm not sure yet, but isn't life all about rolling with what happens, instead of imposing our own vision upon it like so much blank canvas?

That, I think, was my lesson in all this. The planning was perfect - I did everything I was "supposed to" - but perhaps that's not everyone's path. Life always has worked better for me when I'm flying a bit by the seat of my pants. When I trust that things will work out and just show up and do the work. That worry thing just doesn't compute in my brain. It steals so much good creative energy.

Now I'm showing up every day and tweaking the different parts of my life - seeing what can be discarded - what matters and what I need to procure to make things better, easier, more creative and in the flow of life. Our latest experiment is to cut down on the computer time by replacing it with other things - with nights out under the stars dreaming of the future or the past, with at-home artists' retreats - no computers, no distractions, just non-stop art or activities meant to inspire. All easy entertainment are disallowed but anything else goes - meeting the neighbors, volunteer work, gardening, running, hiking - all good. All have the potential to inspire. But no TV, computer, idle chit chat, social media or video games. These are the things that distract.

The initial results are pretty amazing - we've cleaned the whole house, begun doing silly things like carving candles and finished several open-ended creative projects. My kids were sketching - not because I made them do it - but because they had nothing else to distract them and so they just spontaneously started to sketch, or knit, or carve. We've returned to a game we used to play years ago, too - reading and gaming about definitions of new words. Seems that everything is interesting now. Perhaps productivity is simply a matter of removing all distractions. Perhaps removing all distractions happens effortlessly when we simply take a moment to observe what is and is not a distraction.