Oh, dear – I see that I have been badly neglecting my blog this past week. I’m afraid my attention has been elsewhere with the onset of sunny weather and a shopping trip to Anchorage over the long Memorial Day weekend. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like life is going to slow down any time soon. I figured out yesterday that I’ll be home only one out of the next six weekends. Fortunately, I’ll be mostly away for fun stuff like watching Mary Poppins on stage, going to the Katchemak Bay Writers’ Conference in Homer, and bicycle touring with friends from Fairbanks to Wasilla (320 miles!).
While my writing practice may too often be sorely neglected, the one thing I always manage to find time for is reading. I think it’s because I can read any time, even if it’s just for a few minutes when I’m really tired, but I feel like I need more time when I’m fully alert in order to write. Excuses, excuses!
Over the weekend, I finished The Dirty Life – A Memoir of Farming, Food, and Love by Kristin
Kimball. Kimball's account of her relationship with her soon-to-be husband and their new farm is written from her perspective ten years later. She manages to capture the emotions and thoughts of their new life farming together while also adding commentary and information from her later knowledge and experience. Oddly, I’ve read several city-girl-turned-farmer books (I’m not quite sure why – I definitely do not have a latent desire to be a farmer), and found The Dirty Life to be a reasonably good one.
One practice I’ve adopted as I read is marking or copying quotes that speak to me. I’ve written before about definitions of success, and I copied this passage out of The Dirty Life as I found it to be another definition that spoke to me. In this passage, Kimball is writing about her husband’s perspective on success.
In his view, we were already a success, because we were doing something hard and it was something that mattered to us. You don’t measure things like that with words like success or failure, he said. Satisfaction comes from trying hard things and then going on to the next hard thing, regardless of the outcome. What mattered was whether or not you were moving in a direction you thought was right.
How freeing it must be to be able to disassociate oneself from standard measures of success, to not worry about whether you made money or received professional acclaim for your work. To be satisfied with feeling good about the work you’ve done for your own sake, and not because someone else said it was good.
I’m not there yet, but I’m working on it (all puns intended).
