Sayanora, Summer

As surely as the temperatures have dropped, it’s time for another check-in (or would that be check-up?) regarding my quest to combine passion-driven work and a sustainable income.

In a nutshell, here’s my news: lots of movement, little progress.

Since moving back to Colorado over Memorial Day weekend, I have found and left a resume-writing job, then taken a few, halting steps toward a freelance writing business of my own. I applied for a part-time position as editor of a science education journal. I’ve contracted for some social commenting work with Alpine Valley School, where I also volunteer twelve hours per week. (By “social commenting,” I mean looking for local online articles where I can join comment threads and mention the school.)

More recently, I made a great connection with James Marcus Bach, author of Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar, about which I blogged a couple weeks ago. And I just created a new Google group to solicit input, feedback, and overall brainstorming help for taking my  ideas for CASE off the drawing board and into the real (or at least, the virtual) world.

On the personal front, I’ve found a good rhythm with school days and work-from-home days. I’m very glad to be singing with Ars Nova once again, and I love running along the Clear Creek greenbelt three or four days a week. Although I’ve yet to find a new sangha, I’ve been sitting zazen on my own nearly every day. And, wonder of wonders, there’s even been amazing progress on the relationship front these past few weeks.

So things aren’t bad at all…except for my cash flow, which remains decidedly negative.

Blind Reboot

Two weeks since my last post (mea culpa), a year and two weeks since I launched this blog, perhaps it’s time for a checkup—for the blog and, more generally, my quest for a “viable life of creativity and mindfulness.”

The State of the Blog can be dispatched fairly quickly with a few statistics: 113 posts, a total of 5768 views, 27 followers (not counting 9 following various comment threads). While I have no sense of these numbers’ significance, at least I’ve been putting something out there twice a week on average (if one includes posts consisting mostly, or entirely, of other people’s words).

In assessing the status of my quest, however, I’m unsure where to begin, or where to go from there. Actually, the starting point seems clear enough: I recently relocated for the second time in just under a year, returning from Austin to the Denver area (hence the two-week gap in posting).

Yet I’m somewhat at a loss in explaining this move to you, as I scarcely understand it myself. Why return so quickly to the place I was relatively sure, a year ago, I had to leave? Why leave Austin after eleven months (surely too soon to have fully plumbed its potential as a home base, and right as I was just beginning to form strong attachments to my new friends at the Austin Zen Center, Chorus Austin, and Clearview Sudbury School)? Even after fielding such questions several times, my answers seem incomplete and unpolished.

On one level, just as when I left Colorado last year, I knew I needed to shake things up. I went to Austin to craft a new life, yet quickly found myself gravitating toward familiar routines of school and choir, introducing an active Zen practice to replace the hours of commuting I’d left behind. How remarkably easy it proved to seek refuge in busyness; how difficult to avoid overextending myself and neglecting the very nonprofit for whose sake I’d drastically rearranged my life (i.e., CASE, the Center for Advancing Sudbury Education).

And so, for all the changes made, I found myself in a life remarkably similar to the one I’d vowed to reinvent, having given up over a dozen years’ of Colorado connections for…what?