I love my work. I love writing, course-making, teaching, coaching, and art-making - and I even love some of the promotion and administration work that comes with the territory of offering these activities in exchange for money.
Organizing my work around these lovable pursuits is part of a choice I’ve made to create a life that I don’t need a vacation from. I live in a gorgeous place, surrounded by green trees and blue water and stunning views and I try to live each day in a sustainable way, with lots of down time and rest as needed, so I can operate from a pretty full tank most of the time.
But, because I love so much of what I do, I often dismiss the ways in which even lovable work requires real cognitive, emotional, physical and spiritual labor. And even though I have a rest-as-I-go policy, I am feeling depleted at the deeper level from which fresh creative energies come.
After a bit of self-negotiation, I am declaring that it is time for me to spend some time in that part of the cycle of creating that is about restoration, renewal, and deeper rest.
Even though I intellectually know that this “fertile void” space is just as essential to creative work as ideation or manifestation, like all of us, I’m a product of a productivity-driven culture that treats “not doing” as a synonym for “lazy” “useless” and “worthless” (not to mention “poor”). So, I’ve had to reckon with the part of me that urges me to keep going, to “suck it up” and keep writing, or to just offer you recycled posts or recycled ideas…but that’s not what I want Saltee Goodness to be about.
As an artist, as a creator, I feel obligated to reject the aspects of the ethos of productivity that are based on machine metaphors. As an artist, I am not a content factory. The goal and purpose of my work is not to feed some bottomless maw that gobbles up words and images to sell in the attention economy.
My work is to be in open, caring relationship with my inner life and to engage in curious conversations with the ecosystems of nature and culture in which I find myself. That is not factory work.
It is work that requires phases in which my inner well is replenished by taking in the world without requirement to immediately translate it into a product of any kind.
My brain feels the need to drift and lounge, my body is craving less sitting time and more movement, and my heart wants to be available to my family as we celebrate the final weeks of my daughter’s time at home with us before she moves off to California at the end of the month.
This is a long way of announcing that I’ve decided to take a brief hiatus from creating new Saltee Goodness posts for the next four weeks. I promise that while it may appear on the surface that very little is happening, deeper down there are new worlds, new ideas, and new possibilities brewing that need a bit of space to take shape.
(In fact, you can look forward to some big changes coming to this Substack, with new partnerships and offerings that are beginning to take form and may start appearing as early as August!)
Find me on the Garden Tour!
If you are a Whidbey local or a Seattleite looking for an excuse to get out of the city, I’ll be sharing a cheerful new collection of garden-themed assemblages at the Whidbey Garden Tour on Saturday July 12th. Tickets are still available at https://www.wigt.org/
There are five or so gardens on the tour and each one will have a few artists in residence. I’ll be at a stunning garden on the bluff above Holmes Harbor, with views of the Olympic mountains and an unusual “sunken garden” built into the footprint of the foundation of the original house on the property.
Here’s a gallery of just a few of the works (some in-progress) that I’ll be offering to visitors on the Garden Tour:
So, wish me luck as I complete the final few of the 12-14 new pieces I’ll be showing on the Garden Tour and thank you for your patience with a brief hiatus from your Saltee Goodness emails.
I’ll see you in August with so much to share!
With deep gratitude for your readership and continued connections,
Sara
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