I was taking stock, earlier in the week, of what I’ve accomplished during this plague year. And I’m surprised to find it’s actually quite a lot. Since March 15, 2020:
I’ve read 151 books, including about 50 that have been languishing neglected on my to-be-read lists for as much as five years.
I’ve visited the Denver Botanic Gardens nine times and taken many, many pictures.
I’ve cut 11 new linocuts and have a twelfth in-progress that I will probably finish this weekend.
I’ve started a series of printing blocks based on the 13th-14th century Fustat finds (one done, one in progress, one ready to go, about twenty images selected, so I can more or less have one in-progress at any given time for the forseeable future)
I’ve finished half of the Hagembach Toledo initial alphabet woodcuts.
I’ve made two art quilt pieces, and am about halfway through a third.
I’ve done a deep workshopping of Cathedral with a crit group and made some fantastic friends, and started a new pass of editing on Refuge.
I’ve put many, many hours – maybe a couple of hundred hours – into a blackworked partlet, a blackworked mantilla, and a goldworked ropa.
I’ve built and launched this blog.
I’ve made two art quilt pieces, and am about halfway through a third.
I’ve gotten about 20% of the way through Motino and am getting ready to start recipe testing.
I’ve started a deep dive into modern-traditional and contemporary Spanish cooking, have spent the last three months cooking Galician and Asturian food several nights a week and really getting a feel for the cuisine, and am getting ready to switch gears and go full Catalan.
And honestly, most of this has happened in the last few months. The lockdown itself was a pretty foggy, grim place; I was working a lot, but I was also doing a lot of sleeping, doomscrolling, and generally staring at the ceiling, and I got a little bit of a bounce in late summer before falling back into it again and I probably really hit bottom in early December. There were times that I went weeks without touching the woodcut on my desk or the book on my nightstand.
But somewhere along the line I got bored, or angry, or impatient enough to push back on the foggy feeling, and started being more methodical about doing stuff even if I wasn’t feeling it.
Writing is still very hard. I want to get back to it, I do. I want to get the Darzins’ Mill stories out in the world, I have other fiction stories beating their drums in the back of my head, I have life stories of my own I want to get down on paper, I want to go back to environmental and ecosocial writing. The difficulty with it is more than just post-grad-school burn out; I have some deep work to do. I’m trying to get my art practice and other parts of my life on even enough ground that I can put my mental and emotional energy and my time into digging in and powering through that struggle. And blogging regularly (more regularly, at least) is certainly part of it.