A return

Where I’ve been for the last four months

Hello! This is my first email in nearly four months. Back in January, I went on hiatus, which you can read more about here. I thought maybe I would return to this space around the equinox or when the dog violets were blooming (I forgot these are two rather different dates). Now the equinox is well past and the violets are fading. Thank you to the subscribers who stuck around, and welcome to those of you who signed up in the interim. This essay may take a bit different of a direction than my past pieces, but a four month break will do that!

Hepatica americana, March 2024

First, let me write of the joy.

I am deeply in love with birds. It feels like I’ve learned how to see faeries. Previously, birds were nearly invisible to me; they were background characters who made background noise. Now I watch them all day long. I know their names. I listen to and identify their calls. It’s a simple thing, but I can tell a grackle from a starling, something I could not previously do. I take immense joy in spotting and hearing birds for no reason expect that I’ve spotted and heard them. I make no attempts to photograph them, but I do like to record their songs.

Here are the calls of two kestrels. They flew back and forth above my head.

Kestrels, February 2024

I heard these kestrels on the three mile walk I take several times a week. It cuts across a field, down a quiet national park road, and through a borough park. Along with kestrels, I hear and see multiple species of woodpeckers, red tail and red shoulder hawks, a Cooper’s hawk, sometimes a Northern harrier, turkey vultures, raccoons, deer, feral cats, and more. I always come back from these walks better off than when I left. I did this walk all through the winter—through several feet of snow, through sideways winds. I went there as the birds were coming back—first geese, then killdeer, then red wing blackbirds.

It was on this walk that I saw, for the first time, some spring ephemerals. Another joy. Trout lily, cutleaf toothwort, Hepatica Americana. I realize these blooms have come up yearly my entire life (and well before that) but I had never seen them. Maybe I wasn’t in the right places at the right time, or maybe I didn’t have eyes to see them. Again, it’s like spotting faeries.

I did a lot of walking January into April because walking—and particularly my three mile walk—is the best remedy for much of what ails me. Sad? I need to walk. Enraged? Take a walk. Feeling untethered? Yes, definitely walk.

I’ve also been writing, but none of it is publishable work. And I’m ok with that.

For the first time perhaps ever, I’ve been free writing. I always eschewed it before because I thought it didn’t “produce” anything. As though writing is only about production. I made a go of doing The Artist’s Way, but the only thing that’s stuck so far are the morning pages. (These are three pages of handwritten free writing each morning.) If that is all I’ve gotten out of Julia Cameron’s classic book then I am grateful.

I’ve also been writing letters from Love too. This is thanks to

Elizabeth Gilbert

, who has the wonderful Substack

Letters From Love with Elizabeth Gilbert

, wherein she guides people through writing letters to themselves “from” or “in the spirit of” Unconditional Love. I resisted the practice for quite some time—even though I greatly respect Liz and have much to thank her for—until one day I couldn’t resist it anymore and a love letter came tumbling out into my morning pages notebook. Needless to say, I get it now and it has changed me.

In this time away from writing online, I’ve found new joy in being present with others. It’s been a solid four years of loneliness for me. This was a natural consequence of the pandemic and years of friendships and communities becoming strained or falling totally apart. But in the past four months I’ve becoming part of a monthly moon circle hosted by a lovely soul and attended by a group of brave women. I don’t think I can yet sum up my feelings about this group. It’s magical. I’ve also met up with folks at a little park I went to as a kid and exchanged a few pen pal letters.

In the past four months I’ve pulled back, gone inward, tried to get quieter. I’ve read more physical books (like the entire Wolf Hall series and The Signature of All Things) and less online. I’ve read very few Substack essays. I’ve gone weeks without accessing the news, which I highly recommend. I’m trying to be here. I’m working on listening better. My ambition has crumbled. I guess it would appear from the outside that I’ve done very little, but it’s been a very fulfilling winter and early spring for me. Not because it’s been easy or all joyful, but because I’ve been present for it.

Geese, February 2024

I’ll admit that I really didn’t remember when I went on hiatus from publishing here on Peace of the Whole, and I was surprised to realize it was January. Since going on hiatus, I’ve taken long breaks completely away from the internet world. And by “long” I mean about a week or two at a time as completely offline as I can be. Having been on the internet constantly for the past twenty years this feels like a long break.

I have the privilege of being able to be very not-online. The two devices I own are a phone and a very old iPad. I now sometimes give my husband my iPad for “safekeeping” (from me) because I have no chill when it comes to screens. This has left me with just my phone, which I have stripped down as much as I can. I took the web browser off of it some time ago, so that really limits what I can do. I can text, I can call, I can check emails, I can listen to music, I can access maps, I can use the Merlin bird app (the most important app on my phone, really) and my cycle tracker. That’s about it. I deleted social media back in 2021, so those apps are long gone. Sometimes I delete the podcast app for extended periods, for good measure. All of this allows me to get my screen time down to an average of about one hour and forty-five minutes, which I see as a great improvement.

Which is not to say that I’ve not been on the internet. I have. I think I probably currently have about seventeen tabs open in this browser. (Turns out, it was actually twenty-six.) But I have finally done what I long wanted to do: I learned to take breaks. I took multiple breaks. I weaned myself off. I withdrew.

How will you feel if I tell you it was everything I hoped it would be and more? The grass is greener. It was so good that I wasn’t sure if I would keep writing here. But something pulls me back in and I wasn’t sure what it was.

I’m not looking to build or promote anything here on Substack. I don’t want a book deal. I’m not looking to persuade, dissuade, indoctrinate, or convince. Why write on the internet at all then?

Well, for one, someone expressly asked me to please keep writing here, and that means a lot. (You know who you are. Thank you!)

While I contemplated leaving behind “writer” as part of my identity, I find it is something I want to keep. And though none of the usual paths of exercising that identity appeal to me now, I do want the work of writing to stay in my life.

Whilst away, I found I still had the itch to write something for publication. This was surprising to me. Even though I nearly filled a notebook for the first time since I was a teenager and I was feeling more at ease with calmly writing for writing’s sake, there was something else I wanted. I think I want the way things are changed when you know there’s a chance your work will be read. There’s nothing quite like it. I want the act of making something that someone might see, not because someone might see it but because of the way the act of writing will be changed for me because I would be publishing the work.

A few months ago I wrote down a Liz Gilbert quote (I believe she’s paraphrasing the Bhagavad Gita): You are entitled to the process, not the outcome. I want to practice finding contentment in the process because it is all I’m entitled to.

Sparrows and a robin, March 2024

The day after I went on hiatus and started a two week internet break I got an idea to rename this Substack. It’s a really good idea. I really like it. Immediately my brain started designing new branding for this new name, because of course it did. New color scheme, new logo. This idea came to me in the shower (where so many great ideas are born) and by the end of the shower I knew I definitely needed to not change the name. (I did, however, change the logo image because honestly I wasn’t feeling the moon cycles any more.)

Why not change the name, branding, etc.? My main complaint with the internet, distilled into its simplest phrasing, is: It’s too much. It’s too darn much. So I don’t want more. No more hours spent on changing names and branding. No more trying to be flashy. No more honing an internet identity. No more trying to appease the algorithm. I want the process of writing, the process of publication, and if someone chooses to respond I’ll be chuffed indeed. But I’m only entitled to the process, not the results, and I don’t want to forget that.

So I think I have to set some rules for myself before I go on.

The first is that, henceforth, these essays may only be written after an extended period away from the internet. What is “an extended period”? I’m not sure. It seems it takes at least a week to shake off and clear out whatever it is that screens do to me. So in essence, why this rule? Because I am different when I’m not on the internet. And if I’m not on the internet that means I’m elsewhere, and that elsewhere is a very important place to me. I would (and do) consider leaving the internet world entirely. The world that is not the internet, I am committed to. I want to write grounded in the place I am committed to.

Secondly, I will no longer hold myself to standards I disagree with and that don’t serve me. Going forward, there might be less sources, less citing, less links. I might—gasp—get things wrong, including missing words. I’ve been so worried about this in the past, but I’m not writing a paper for a college class. And, let’s be honest, what I’m writing is small peanuts. It’s a tiny post by some gal on the vast internet. I shouldn’t be bending over backwards, trying to cite my sources better than folks at The Atlantic can seem to manage. And I could not care less about growth, readership, the algorithm, etc. I just cannot be arsed.

Third rule: none of what I think of as complaint baiting. No baiting at all. No incendiary headlines. No essays written from a place of rage. No essays written just to appease. No essays without kindness. If you can’t write it with wonder and awe don’t write it at all!

The biggest claim I can make here is that I’m writing letters. These are letters.

I hope to goodness they are letters rooted in…well, in what I want to call “the real world.” That term seems like a bit much, but what do you call the world beyond the edges of the internet? The first world we had. Until 1983 we had just the world we could see. Yes, we told and wrote stories, dreamed dreams, did other intangible, ephemeral things. But nothing had ever been as untethered to physical reality as the internet. So to me it seems like the internet is a world unto itself. And I know I’m not the only one who thinks this. The first time I said “the real world” you knew what I meant.

The more I pull away from the internet world the more I’m worried for us. The more I dislike the internet’s customs and cultures. It isn’t not just the technology—the glowing blue screens, the apps designed to be addictive, and the threat of AI. It’s also the way we humans are using the internet, the way we are acting in reaction to being used by the internet, and the way our participation in the internet has changed our behaviors both on and off our screens.

Tufted titmouse, April 2024

The internet world is not blending seamlessly with the tactile, the somatic, the ancient paths that have made us and been made by us. You can “lose yourself in a book,” sure, but it’s not really the same as losing yourself into an endless scrolling journey, or a bingeing a show with nine seasons after a day spent flipping through spread sheets and Zoom meetings. We’ve all really lost the sense of our bodies and environments with a screen in front of our faces. We know how that feels, and many of us don’t like it.

It’s hard to straddle these two worlds.

Going forward there will probably be more letters about this. And birds. And other small wonderful things I see on my walks. And yes, I’ll still talk about cyclical living because it’s how I live. A few weeks ago I wrote down: “What do I actually want to write about?” The list contained: disconnection from nature, life without social media, the myth of the individual carbon footprint, seasonal changes, figuring out how to live in the face of climate collapse, and more.

If these sound like letters you’d like to receive, please stick around. I’m back for now.

Thank you for reading (and listening),

Ema