Turns out I actually love winter, at least the damp, gentle Pacific Northwest variety. I spend the summer tripping on the season’s melancholy temporality—on my awareness of time’s passage and short-lived glory, like summer is the only time for pleasure. In winter, time settles in and it’s relieving—an actual pause. Still, when December arrived, once again, I wasn’t prepared for it. No handmade gifts, no cards, few festive decorations, no solstice ritual. I wasn’t ready to be relaxed and cozy, to press “pause” and try to squeeze a year’s worth of reflection through the sieve of a few dark, beautiful weeks.
It’s often my overwrought way to feel unprepared for the season. In this bundle of worry, I’m noticing a funny paradox, maybe one that’s starting to loosen. Wanting (and not having) candles and string lights and a Jewish pseudo-Xmas tree and “Season’s Greetings” cards printed with a family portrait has the sharp edge of missed deadlines and critical self-awareness. There’s the proprioception of time passed, lamenting a seasonal shift I was checked out of until it hit me. But those seasonal accessories and decorations somehow also represent the possibility of getting out from my fixation on the passage of linear time (as if observed as an outsider) and into a participation with its seasons.
In truth, I did participate a little. I did burn some weird latkes and also hung a wreath on the front door, which I’ve never done before. This involved another first: venturing into the psychedelic expanse of Shelton’s Wal-Mart to buy a wreath-hanger, where I reveled in the hangar of tacky red ribbons and colorful, disposable things. This felt seasonal in a social way, a little disturbing to witness but instead of feeling cynical, I sympathized with the excess. I drank a kind of Twinings mint tea branded creamy for Christmas. A few days after the solstice, I caught a little cold and rested. I watched The Wind and The Willows, which I think is an annual ritual for me now. I observed the short days and long nights.
I don’t think it’s because of these things, but miraculously I’ve been able to look beyond the frame of the story about how behind I am, how not on top of my shit I am (like what I wrote up there). I mean, it is reassuring to see evidence that I do have rituals and can mark the season. But it’s more like the prospect of “being on top of things” has been exposed as fiction, a fantasy that is simultaneously soothing and harsh. The fiction serves some kind of purpose, an unhelpful antidote to anxiety that ends up revving that nervous engine. Releasing it has come in waves and glimmers, returning voluptuous relief that makes me hungry for more surrender. What if this is the kind winter I’m having and there’s no fixing it—there’s no problem there? What if there is no being more on top of things, or what if that’s not really the point? How much does trying to change/improve myself only yield misery or more overwhelm? What if the best remedy for overwhelm is to work with (and experience) the feeling itself, instead of reflexively addressing or fretting over the conditions which spark it, over all those unmet deadlines or unfinished tasks?
I really wanted 2023 to be the year where I clear the decks and clean up all the clutter—the year where I stop losing things in the digital abyss. I didn’t arrive at that point of completion, and what exactly that “point” is, I’d like to think about. But I’m proud of progress I’ve made and what I’ve learned about how things “click” for me; small pockets of my daily life are becoming more manageable. This progress has been enabled by making a peace deal with the overall situation, which is, I think, the inevitability of mess—the fact that I will never get it all under control. I’m wrapping up the year unfinished, but slightly less bothered by that.
Some big things have changed for me in the past few months, too. The biggest shift is that I’m actually writing again, working on my book in little bits at a time. I’ve loosened my grip on the outcome. Been training myself to stop taking a bird’s eye view on what I’m doing and where I’m going with the project—a chronic tendency that made the work overly conceptual and overall less fun. It’s an exercise in process, writing sketchy idea scraps and story fragments about houses and home (my current theme) in windows of time that appear or that I create. Getting into sentences without knowing where I’m going is teaching me (always all over again) that it’s possible to let go of control and still create things—and actually, trying to finish something before it’s ready is less productive than ceding over to the messy process.
In October, I wrote to you about the weeks I spent at Ragdale (an artist residency) and what they taught me—how being there got me back in touch with the basic principle of just showing up to the page. (You can read that letter here.) The renewed emphasis on practice that I described then feels directly linked to this emerging theme of surrender. Showing up without knowing where I’m headed, even when that just feels like going through the motions, is an act of faith and a form of participation. And this participation is, I think, also a new feature in my daily life, in that surrender to a baseline level of chaos.
Daily life and writing practice are merging in other ways, too. I’m starting to let the present bleed into what I’m writing, especially my neurotic (but under-resourced and largely hypothetical) fixations on interior decoration and DIY home repair. It’s not where I expected to go, but now it seems ridiculous not to go there. It’s uncannily relevant to the overarching project. It is also just satisfying to write about the present rather than to keep it at bay. The writing—it’s not always “coming together,” but it feels good to do. The immediacy of its mess is something I can work with.
When I did my smidge of writing this morning, I had a thought about the difficulty of working with time in narrative, a challenge I often run into in the weird lyric/personal essay forms I work in—so many time periods woven together, so many registers. Maybe one of the reasons this is hard is because we are so often not present with our “now.” It’s hard to work with material from the past when you don’t even really know or feel the moment you are in, so anything to get into the present is probably helpful for writing. (I can only access lucidity in the present; the present is the only place where I can make things happen.)
I’ll be thinking about that as we pass into the new year, a marker that can feel both arbitrary and fraught with ambition. Anything I can do to get into this moment makes the whole situation more workable. There are things I hope for in the year ahead, but this one has given me greater respect for the double-edged sword of aspiration—how sometimes wanting things to be different becomes an avenue for leaving myself behind, and changing them seems so vast and overwhelming that I can’t engage with it at all. What I want in the days, weeks, and months ahead is to be awake and to walk through the portal that is letting go into greater connection with what’s actually happening and how I’d like to engage with it.
Yours with love,
Siloh
Now booking creative advising sessions!
From January 12th through February 14th, 2024, I’ll be holding a limited number of 55-minute, one-on-one creative advising sessions at a sliding scale price of $75-$175. Held via Zoom or phone, these are spacious conversations which yield greater clarity about what you’re working on/with and connect you with creative strategies and resources you can use on your own terms.
Bring your charged, confusing manuscript, your desire for a creative routine, your email marketing questions, your website, your aspiration for file maintenance to stop standing in the way of your publishing goals (gulp), your four different planners—anything that you’re doing/making/conceptualizing—and we’ll collaborate on moving things forward in a way that feels good.
To schedule, reply to this email or email me at info@silohradovsky.net. <3
After Valentine’s Day, I’ll be closing up shop for 3-4 weeks to reflect and assemble a new offering.
Some context: Revising the format and focus of my coaching practice is one of those unfinished projects from 2023. In the past, these sessions were branded as writing-focused, but that doesn’t capture the full scope of what I was (and want to be) doing: guidance around creative and ADHD-friendly organization has been calling out as a theme; I work with small businesses on their marketing; etc, etc. These questions have had me in a holding pattern for a while but I’m taking some action as a route towards greater clarity—opening up the doors for a spell, getting back in the work. :)
Experimental Practice podcast: year in review
Episode 1 - The revolutionary comes from the future | Miranda Mellis (December 31st, 2022)
Episode 2 - A shimmering scene | Selah Saterstrom (June 16th, 2023)
Episode 3 - The soil we were in | Alissa Hattman (November 27th, 2023)
Daily artifacts
Early to bed in candy cane pajamas.
Sore fingers and then the swelling subsides. An appointment with a rheumatologist.
Little Bugs is sick in a chronic way, but with a fresh burst of urgency and I’ve been coordinating her care with an incredibly caring and trustworthy veterinarian. It is a miracle how kind people can be even with the ambient catastrophes—it makes me want to be that nice, too. To have a job where I’m helpful.
Have I slipped into full-on job hatred? How many more anecdotes can I gather for hypothetical absurdist short stories about a fictional mushroom supplement company?
Still into Buddhism (reading a Chogyam Trungpa book in bed), still keep forgetting to meditate but I do take walks.
I realized I don’t hate Yoga with Adriene and in fact I really like it. Her voice.
Searching the wrong keywords on YouTube to find out why our windows were leaking. The vast range of production quality in the DIY home repair genre.
I wanted to write a newsletter last month, a way to compile resources about Gaza but then got overwhelmed and feel awful about how disengaged I am, but/and feeling awful about myself isn’t motivating—doesn’t break the holding pattern. I’m trying to open up to engaging.
Started obsessing about the garden again, reading seed catalogs and Richo Cech books recreationally, is that embarrassing? Legitimately very excited to pre-order Growing Plant Medicine Volume 2.
Planting cover crops off-season as an experiment because we ripped our yard up in September then got COVID then I went to Illinois for Ragdale and it was too late, the fucking quack grass is everywhere and still growing so maybe cover crops can, too. Watched this video about Ruth Stout was on the motivational farming playlist Nils shared and it’s inspiring—so anarchist.
Sheryl Crow, at least one listen through, mildly nostalgic. The Library Tapes albums Sunset and Dusk.
My pal Isa opened a gallery and coffeeshop in Shelton and it’s adorable: Marmo.
Offerings
My website — More about my work
Experimental Practice podcast — Conversations about cross-genre and interdisciplinary work, culture, writing craft, and creative practice
Follow me on Instagram — It is what it is
Read more Essence of Toast — Archive of past letters