Dear friends,

After hitting the huge milestone of finishing my first draft of Making Meaning, Making Soul: Developing Your Inner Life as a Political Act, I took a couple of weeks off just to breathe and heal from my summer adventures. Now I’m watching a course from The Teaching Company called How to Publish Your Book, and I have to admit that the course is making me feel as if writing the book is going to have been the easy part! Oh well, I’ll take it one step at a time. I will get this book out into the world one way or another!

While watching the program, I’ve been making little notebooks. It’s terribly easy, and terribly fun. I just use cardstock or leftover thick paper from other projects, cut a small pile of copy paper scraps a slight bit smaller than the thicker covers, and staple them at the crease. Totally zero waste, they are made up of the waste from other projects. The books are limited to the size of the stapler — since the staple is in the middle of the cover, the papers need to fit inside the length of the stapler. So far, I’ve just glued on images I’ve cut from magazines or copied from the internet. The “Owl Stay Weird” notebook is from a sticker for the Owl Acoustic Lounge, the venue where (in non-Covid times) we had our monthly Poetry Open Mics. (The Open Mics are currently conducted on zoom). Perhaps I will do some simple original painting on the covers, but I want them to be ordinary pocket notebooks, used for notes, grocery lists, and great ideas we don’t want to lose.

I find that when I make things from paper, or put images on paper or canvas with paints, my brain goes into the most exquisite dreamy space —- my hands busy, my mind wanders and rests, escaping from the busy world’s imperative to do, do, do! Doing art and making things is one of my ways to “practice what I preach” in my new book —- that at least 20 minutes a day of refusing to give in to the overculture’s demands allows a person to know themselves, what they love, and what they’re willing to give their life’s energy to. It frees a person to be themselves — human, unique, a gift from the universe to themselves and to all of us. I’m looking forward to quieter days of doing just that, to being just that.

With much love and many blessings,

Cat