And we're back...

Hello! Hello!

Hello, friends! It’s been a few weeks since we were all together. Weeks, for me, full of lake time with my kids, which I’ll share my favorite pics from, and unexpected excitement around the selection of Tim Walz as the Democratic candidate for Vice-President. (I didn’t succeed in staying off of screens as much as I had hoped in the wake of that announcement, I’ll confess.)

When I got back, the semester began in earnest at the university where I work. I ended up helping to staff a new international student orientation, overseeing the karaoke room at game night. Did you know there’s karaoke in Hindi? I didn’t. Watching three dozen South Asian students jubilantly singing Indian hip-hop (For. Hours.) at the top of their lungs while dancing like it was some kind of Bollywood house party, even though it meant being up way past my bedtime on a Saturday, was an experience I wouldn’t have missed for the world.

What have you been up to the last few weeks? Traveling? Getting your kids started at school? Reveling in summer produce? Working long hours? Tell me all about it.

In the mornings I wished we were on the east side of the lake so I could drink my coffee in the sunshine, but every evening the sunset would remind me how good it was to be on the west side.

Now, that we’re all back here, though, we can get down to it. First, a tiny story…

The piano bench was just wide enough when I was in single digits that I could spread my hands widely on either side of me to create a nice, solid base. Then I would push up through my palms and into my shoulders to lift my hips up off the seat, swinging my hips side-to-side, then back-and-forth, over and over and over again. When my arms got tired, I’d plop back down and carefully read the spine of every book on the bookshelf, as well as the bumper sticker affixed to the dark wood of the closet door. The books ran the gamut from Quaker history and philosophy to popular fiction. The bumper sticker read, “Our politicians are the best that money can buy.”

I was supposed to be practicing playing piano behind the door in the downstairs guest room. But, like excusing myself from the table to spit my cooked spinach in the toilet, I decidedly, but surreptitiously, refused.

I realize now that taking piano lessons, any extra-curricular lessons at all really, is a privilege and a gift. My own children never took music lessons outside of the classroom. It would have been one more expense to negotiate with their father, one more scheduled appointment we’d have to divvy up, as likely as not meaning I’d have to take off work to make it happen, and I just…couldn’t manage it.

My parents didn’t have those particular challenges to face. So, for several years of my young life I went to piano lessons every week with an orange-haired, bespectacled woman from our Quaker Meeting named Jenny. She ran me through my scales, prodded me through Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star and Hot Cross Buns until my hands disentangled themselves from each other enough for me to handle classical music. At which point, I learned songs that every child who’s ever taken piano lessons recognizes– Clair de Lune, Für Elise, probably some Chopin.

The problem was, I didn’t like classical music or have any driving desire to play. So, I didn’t want to practice or apply myself to learning to read music. Luckily (or maybe not), I had a naturally good ear and enormous hands (both inherited from my dad), so memorizing simple pieces and managing the proper fingering was pretty easy for me with very little discipline or drive at all.

Thus evolved my weekly ritual of balancing on my hands, staring off into space, and occasionally plunking a key for most of every week’s practice sessions, then rushing to play the song in the hour or two before my lesson enough times that I had it memorized and could “perform” it for Jenny without having to look at the score. Once the pieces and execution got difficult enough that I couldn’t lean on my natural capacity and had to actually expand my skills, I quit.

This inlet at the south end of the lake had enclosed, leafy green, river vibes. Rivers being much more my speed, I spent hours paddling down it as far as I could, searching for beavers and turtles, then reluctantly turning around to battle the wind across the lake on the way home.

Most of my subsequent creative pursuits have followed a similar pattern. Though I’ve learned to practice over the years, spending many happy hours throwing pots on the wheel, weaving blankets on a loom, singing in a choir, and putting words on a page, there has always come a point where what would be required to push beyond my innate talents feels beyond me and I walk away. 

Since becoming an adult, I’ve repeatedly argued that necessity, in fact, drags me away. I don’t have the equipment, money, space, or time. I have to work a steady job, provide us with benefits, focus on my kids. And those things are true. But underneath that layer of surface truth is a well-cap of risk aversion protecting me from a seemingly bottomless hole of self-doubt and fear of failure.

This doesn’t make me special or in possession of a psychology that offers unique challenges. It just makes me an artist and also, much to my chagrin at times, human.

Though I don’t want to quit writing (most days), I’m aware that writing the newsletter, in particular, has evolved a similar rhythm to those early days killing time on the piano bench. I spend much of the early part of the week dithering about, wondering what the heck I’m going to write while trying to stay fully present in my analogue life of job, kids, community, and house. Then I get a couple of nights of poor sleep because I’m anxious I’ll have nothing to say, yet at 3 AM my brain offers a cacophony of thoughts, which I resent because I’m middle-aged and have no real vices left. You want to take my sleep now, too?!? Defiantly, I refuse to turn on the light and write any of these ideas down, causing them to wander off to more hospitable environs by the time my alarm goes off.

Sometime on Wednesday or Thursday I start scrambling to draft something. Friday morning I hope my day job isn’t too scheduled so I can work surreptitiously at my desk on edits. As soon as possible after edits are done the newsletter goes out. Then I collapse internally for a few days and it all begins again.

I’m not discounting the work I do. Good words make it onto the page. Pulling it together most every week for nearly four years now is an accomplishment I couldn’t have imagined pulling off when I began. The questions I’m posing are, I believe, needful for our world, even, and I love the conversations we have in the comments. But I’m also aware that the writing itself relies nearly entirely on my inborn facility for language and a certain instinctual understanding of how to tell a story (or preach a sermon, all praises to my lineage of pastors and church ladies).

The deeper I get into writing this book I’m working on, though, the more I feel like I’m pushing against the boundaries of what comes easily. I’m trying, instead, to do something I don’t really know how to do, and for once, I don’t want to quit because it’s (really, really) hard. 

What I want to do is hunker down and do focused, no-more-excuses, get-way-down-in-it work. I want to push beyond what I already know and surprise myself. But I don’t really have the time or creative energy required when I’m jumping on and off the weekly newsletter treadmill, as self-created as it may be. I don’t think this will always be the case. I just think it’s the case right now, when I’m pushing to get a complete draft of the book done by the end of the year. 

Hurricane Debby dumped rain on us nearly all of our last full day, but then this happened. I imagine the work on the book being like this. Like I’m pulling back a dark curtain to find the light underneath.

All this to say, I need to change things up here for a bit to free up that literal and psychic time. My plan is to publish a new newsletter the last Friday of every month until the end of December. I’ll make sure there are resources and links to share in it because I’m always listening to and reading stuff that’s worth passing along. And I’ll be noodling around about something in my brain, writing about it, and hoping we’ll have some conversation about it because that’s what we do here together.

Between new newsletters, I’m going to share stuff from the archives, including some stuff that was locked behind a paywall in the past. We’ve been at this for nearly four years. There’s a lot worth revisiting. 

Does that make sense? I hope so. Will you stick with me? I really hope that, too. Come January, we’ll celebrate the newsletter’s birthday (and mine!) and a completed draft of this book together. 

Thank you, thank you, thank you for helping me make this all happen.

XO,

Asha