Cut Adrift

One day, while scrolling somewhat mindlessly online, I stumble over someone’s reposting of one of Virginia Woolf’s (abridged) diary entries from Wednesday, October 15, 1931, which says:

“I will cut adrift – I will sit on pavements and drink coffee – I will dream; I will take my mind out of its iron cage and let it swim – this fine October.”

And that image of sitting to dream tugs at something half-asleep in my soul.

For there is the memory of sitting at cafes in this and other countries, sipping on some drink or the other while within my heart dreams sing in harmony. For there is the memory of all the ways my mind likes to swim. There are all the Octobers I can remember.

A series of golden and red-turned leaves drifting, fluttering, dancing to the ground. A rejoicing for cooler mornings. The promise of winter.  

It’s the word “dream” that reminds me of something else I saw (also when mindlessly scrolling). It was a video reel showing a man (presumably Dr. Kamal Sabran himself) making and recording sounds in a library-study-like room with music equipment, shelves, books, desks. These sounds, the click of a typewriter’s keys against the blip of pulsating bass next to a synthesizer’s stereo drumbeat, come one after the other as the following words play across the screen:  

“Do not try to be more productive than a machine.

Be more unpredictable than one.

Slow down. Sleep in. Be late. Dream sideways.

Every moment you refuse to hustle for the algorithm, you reclaim your right to be a human being—not a human doing.

Your value is not in output.

It’s in awe.

It’s in the fact that you still look at the sky and say: “Wow.”

We do not need to compete with AI.

We need to reclaim the terrain of the soul.

Let the machines optimize. Let them calculate, simulate, replicate.

We will imagine, wander, err, contradict, and wonder.

Our power is not in precision.

It’s in presence.  

Not in speed, but in stillness. 

Not in perfection, but in the poetic glitch of being alive.

The sparking words, more than the sounds, send me off to write a response of my own about slipping sideways out of the tumble of the cogs and doing as I dream.

It’s too easy to forget “the poetic glitch of being alive” and how to “cut adrift” in the sea-thrashing of becoming – becoming a better version of myself, becoming relevant, becoming authentic, becoming seen, becoming both the Jack of All Trades and the Master of Everything, becoming so good I can’t be ignored, becoming and becoming.

There’s nothing wrong with becoming.

But to breathe in time with the humming frequencies of the planets and the stars, to sway to the sweet rhythm of wind-rocked trees, to feel the tingle of blood in my fingertips is to remember.

And, oh, how good it is, like a full night’s sleep, to remember, to be beckoned soulward again, to be reminded of the gift of consciousness, creativity, wonder, and what it is to be alive.

 

  

 

Making Room

After years of pretending I don’t live here, I finally realize I do – that I’m living here, in this room, in this house, in this city, in this state, at least for now – and decide to unpack the items I’ve kept in storage in my mom’s garage since I left my Colorado place 14 years ago and moved to Peru.

In the process of converting the space from a guest room into my room, I rearrange furniture and hang up some of the artwork I’ve collected along the way in my travels, been given, or created myself. I put books on the shelves. I engage my mom’s help in finding a comfy chair and a rug to tie it all together.

My nephew, a child of the videocall age, during a recent call in which he’d had me show him the room and noticed the new configuration with more open floor area, tells me, “Thank you for making more room for us to play in.”

As if I’d done it for him, for that purpose.

Well, maybe I did. As much for him as for me.

For what is life but our individual efforts to settle in? To make space to play in? To live our own stories? What is life but an attempt to find out where we belong, even if only temporarily?

Along those same lines, in this year of being a “professional writer,” I’m learning how to step into more of what I want and who I want to be. Even so, I still say professional writer with quotes around it. For I don’t quite know what that means. Except that I show up daily to write, put my work out for anyone to take it if they want to, and have begun to learn the ins and outs of marketing and advertising. It’s a process.   

Just as I did for the room, I’m putting parts of myself out on a shelf where anyone can read the titles. And as I do, as I dust and straighten spines, I’m pleased to see old favorites and familiar stories even as I make notes of the books I’d like to add—or in this analogy, the ways I’d like to change, grow, and become better. Not just as a writer, either, but also as a human.

I’m doing all this, so that one day, as my nephew did about my rearranging, I can thank myself for making room in this world for me to be me.