{"id":18961,"date":"2014-10-09T17:45:09","date_gmt":"2014-10-10T00:45:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/ClaireWolfe\/?p=18961"},"modified":"2014-10-09T17:45:09","modified_gmt":"2014-10-10T00:45:09","slug":"steps-on-the-road-to-advanced-hermitting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/2014\/10\/09\/steps-on-the-road-to-advanced-hermitting\/","title":{"rendered":"Steps on the road to advanced hermitting"},"content":{"rendered":"

Or is it hermitude? I don’t know. But in any case, I haven’t forgotten my intention to commence a period of deeper hermitness<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The world has been too much with me, late and soon<\/a>. That whole JPFO business was hard and bitter. The aftermath’s been no picnic, either. Even though you and some renewed work for the Backwoods Home<\/i> print ‘zine have risen to help me through the money part of that, the emotional part is just … whammo.<\/p>\n

But I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to forge a plan. You can probably help. You always do.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

—–<\/p>\n

Since first blogging about this a month ago, I haven’t gotten very far. Or I don’t feel<\/i> I’ve gotten very far. There are some aspects about how<\/i> to do this, how long<\/i> to do this, and what I want<\/i> from doing this that I haven’t made a millimeter of progress on.<\/p>\n

One — minor! — thing I just did, though, was to create a topic sub-category under “Mind and Spirit” called “The Retreat.” This is the first post carrying that tag.<\/p>\n

Huge, eh?<\/p>\n

—–<\/p>\n

But anyhow, some of the very biggest questions, I simply bang my brain on. And the brain comes out the loser.<\/p>\n

HOW do I cut back on email?<\/p>\n

If I try to limit my computer time strictly enough to break the addiction, will I listen to myself, or will I rebel and sneak “just one” morning on the computer? And from then on it’s the slippery slope to debauchery and degradation<\/del> checking the damned nooz for two hours a day.<\/p>\n

I say I want to focus on other aspects of creativity. But I know me. Creativity, as in either art or book writing, scares<\/i> me and most of the time I’ll do anything to avoid it. See “computer addiction,” above.<\/p>\n

What do I really want to achieve? Or is this more about what I want to get away from?<\/i><\/p>\n

There are questions I hesitate to bring up here because they would blow away any last shreds of wise guruhood any of you longtime readers might be tempted to credit me with. Even the most conscious life gets muddled at times. Or call it reaching the place in the dark woods where paths diverge and you don’t know where to turn. But it feels as if I’m failing to live up to something.<\/p>\n

What, I don’t know. There’s a lot I don’t know right now.<\/p>\n

I even got away to the beach and walked and walked and walked and walked (usually the cure or inspiration for anything) and neither the brain nor the dilemmas budged.<\/p>\n

—–<\/p>\n

Yet at the same time, things are working in the ether.<\/p>\n

I have the idea that I’ll do the hermitude in two stages. That’s new. The first stage will begin somewhere between October 15 and the first of November and go to December 31. At that point I’ll evaluate what’s working, what’s not, what more or what less I might want to do, etc.<\/p>\n

I also just realized that while this is a lot about things I want to get away from, I’ve been taking the wrong path by thinking “I want less email” or “I should limit my computer time.” The real<\/i> beginning of the path is, “I want fewer obligations<\/i>.”<\/p>\n

Heck, fewer<\/i>??? I want no damned obligations! I want to be as un-responsible as a stoned surfer on a Southern California beach. <\/p>\n

Not ir<\/i>responsible, mind you. Things still have to be done with honor and responsibility.<\/p>\n

But see? Right there, I depart from that surfer and go down the always-uphill rocky road of obligation<\/i>.<\/p>\n

You see the problem. Anyhow, every other thing I need to get off my mind and body is related to that: obligation<\/i> — meeting others’ expectations or following through on what my own standards tell me I must do, even if that little brat down deep in my soul says, “Poo on that!”<\/p>\n

—–<\/p>\n

One reason I don’t know exactly when to start is because of a volunteer commitment I made long ago and must now fulfill because the other, better, person who usually does it has been direly ill.<\/p>\n

But the rescue group did agree to scale the scope back severely on the most major project because there was no way to pull together a huge community effort in the next few weeks, as they’d originally planned. So I’m doing a few things here and there, but no monster project oh thank heaven. Leaning more towards 10\/15 now than 11\/1.<\/p>\n

One thing they asked me to do was see if we could get one of our cats onto a TV show. I’m not familiar with the show, but I think it’s on Animal Planet<\/i> and features cats whose personalities and habits can ruin people’s relationships. Sort of a cat whisperer thing. We’ve got a shelter cat who’s potentially one of those ruiners, and right now she’s ruining all her own chances of getting adopted. So even though this show doesn’t normally do animals in shelters (far as I know) one of our chief cat ladies asked me to edit a letter asking the show to help our catty-beast.<\/p>\n

Her copy was really helpful, but it was what you’d expect from a non-writer. “Hello, I’d like to introduce myself and the group I work with …”<\/p>\n

But this is TV. Visual. And this is making a pitch. Grab ’em by the ears in the first dozen words.<\/p>\n

So it was fun working with the cat lady and our photographer (who is first class) to come up with something bright, then I put it all together into a .pdf that opens, “This is Special. Special lives on a wall.” It went on not only to talk about the crazy cat but to emphasize what a scenic area this is and blah blah blah. Pix of our extremely colorful and cutely designed little shelter, etc.<\/p>\n

That was a little over a week ago. Cat Lady just emailed to say the casting director of the show called and we’re in the running.<\/p>\n

Now they want video of the cat actually making a volunteer bleed. But that, oh thank you, is somebody else’s job.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Or is it hermitude? I don’t know. But in any case, I haven’t forgotten my intention to commence a period of deeper hermitness. The world has been too much with me, late and soon. That whole JPFO business was hard and bitter. The aftermath’s been no picnic, either. Even though you and some renewed work for the Backwoods Home print ‘zine have risen to help me through the money part of that, the emotional part is just … whammo. But I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to forge a plan. You can probably help. You always do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,18,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dogs-and-cats","category-mind-and-spirit","category-the-retreat","ratio-natural","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18961\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}