Cackling in the Uncertainty
I woke up this morning to see the trees behind my house dropped their orange crowns seemingly overnight.
I can see the forest floor from inside my house now. It is a deep golden orange — a sweet surprise that also won’t last too long.
I’ve been drafting a long post about change and about longing and about the tools to get where we’re going, specifically where I’m going and how I’m changing. It’s still in draft mode. I’m not ready to share in part because pushing the orange button shares to the world what I’m changing and that comes with some risk. I am trying to temper caution with impulse.
Last week, the northern lights could be seen in my neighborhood. I know they were bright pink in the sky because my neighborhood text thread was exploding with pictures of it, but I did not see it. I was upstairs on Zoom in a meeting of my town’s Affordable Housing Trust— participating in slow work of democratic governance to make decisions about the future — a long incrementally built future through which a vote that night makes a meeting possible that makes a decision possible that will someday result in 30 homes that people without a lot of income can afford. It is work I think is important and I am committed to1. But it’s not as gratifying — as serotonin boosting — as seeing the northern lights from my front yard with my kids. It made me think, once again, as always, about how I’m spending2 my time on this earth.
Put a cat on it
The last couple of weeks I’ve been doing an experiment. Along with my wonderful and talented wife, Nova, a romance writer by morning and design director by day, I’ve been designing things for our new small business, Strategic Creations. It’s one tactical step of a strategic iteration to create possibilities that aren’t yet present. I’ll say more about our big orientation and hopes later. But at night I’ve been pushing to get these shops — Read Romance Clothing and Gifts and Tender Guy Apparel — live into the world3.
Part of that pushing involves designing in a way that I haven’t for a very, very long time. Nova has shared with me that it’s an absolutely delight to walk through the room and hear me cackling while I work; I don’t think it’s ever happened in my work, which usually involves absorbing the horrors of the world and transmitting it to other people in some synthesized format.
The first collection is Read Romance Clothing & Gifts, a shop with clothing and mugs and such for romance readers and writers. It’s delight and pride in communication and connection that’s optimistic, caring, and fun. It’s items for people who share a culture of desire.
The wonder of designing about stories is that it gives me permission to lean into the random, the unlikely, and the ridiculous. Like this one:
The second collection, Tender Guy Apparel, is a shop for masculine cut clothes oriented toward connection, cultivating hope and care, and delight. We’ve got thank you cards, phone covers, and art prints too — tools I can feel good gifting to my young adult nephews this season.
It’s borne of many years trying to find masculine cut/men’s clothes on the Internet only to be met with a barrage of machine guns, threatening slogans and other world-crushing horror packaged as normal, edgy, or fun.
I hope and I practice at making a world where every human has what they need and I know so many of you do too. And when things are crispy and uncertain, I am grateful for the small delights, for finding that I can cackle in uncertainty after many decades of holding everything as tightly as I can. What will we become? We will find out together.
Part of me wants to cut this part. Part of this field of uncertainty that I am in, or rather that I was in and now I am in more certainty, is that I think/feel/know deep inside me that doing is so much more important than showing each other we are doing — which is COMPLICATED as a person whose job is communications for social political change. I grieve how much performing a political opinion takes the place of doing the often long boring-ness of political work. And yet I am not yet able to talk about something like my own delight without justifying that I am not turning myself fully away from the demands of our time to fight for human rights and our livable shared future.
living through. living in. embodying. absorbing. floating in. enduring. I’m curious if the word “spending” must stay rooted with money-exchange, a capital-based productivity measurement of time in life, or if there’s an older deeper root to this word that captures what it is to choose a certain existence within a time frame? Do you know of good reflections or work-arounds on this?
Of course, I invite you to check out the shops, share with your friends, and get some things for yourself and your loved ones if you want to! You can follow us on Instagram Here and Here for consistent updates. But that’s not the point of sharing this post and my inner concentric circles are not the target audiences for these shops. So thanks for your grace as we endure capitalism’s saturation of our relations.