Butterfly Mind

Too many options

April 14th, 2025

I’ve started this blog post three times. I’ve frozen on the first paragraph of each one. My first attempt was to write about the mulch that’s arriving today. My second was to write about my plans for sabbatical. My third was to write about my ambition to read The Odyssey and other classics. Each time, my brain stops me, “What’s there to say? What about this other topic?”

A friend said they treated their sabbatical as practice for retirement. I laughed at the time, but after thinking more about it, I realized yes, it’s a huge shift to suddenly have nothing but time after years of lamenting its deficit. All the things you daydream about when other life obligations get in the way, when you say “If I didn’t have to work I would…” or “I wish I could write more but I don’t have time” — you can do those things now. But will you?

I now have a surfeit of time. Will I do all the things I thought I’d want to do if my time belonged to no-one else? The problem I’m facing is that my list is very long. I’ve got notebooks filled with “things I want to do on sabbatical.”

When faced with an abundance of choices and without constraints, I become overwhelmed and cannot choose. When I sat down to write today, I couldn’t decide whether to journal or blog first. When I chose to blog, I couldn’t decide which direction to go. Making decisions requires exertion. And opinion. And a point of view.

Last year I read a book that has stuck with me, Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See. The author made a point that struck me: any piece of art is a series of decisions. From the original idea to each individual brush stroke, every component of a work of art requires choice on the artist’s part. An artist has the entire universe to work with. From the infinite possibilities, they create a distilled point of view: a woman wearing a yellow blouse, sitting sideways at a desk; a novel about a loner loser who moves to Newfoundland, finds himself, and becomes beloved; a song about a blackbird.

Sometimes the thing to do is just get started, I guess. I wasn’t getting anywhere with each of my original ideas, so I deleted them all and decided to write about the thing that was in my way. Keep the pen moving. That’s the lesson of all the writing practice I’ve done over the years. When the pen stops, find another path. Even though this is a throwaway post, at least it got me writing.
Sabbatical!

April 12th, 2025

I’m writing this from a hotel room bed. It’s not even 5am. I have no obligations until noon when the Uber comes to carry my teammates and me to the airport, but I can’t sleep because I feel like a kid on Christmas day. Today is the last day of my team meetup in Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic. It is also the first day of my sabbatical. For the next three months, my time is mine to rest, visit friends, garden, travel, and create.

It feels unsettling to begin a sabbatical right now. I have survivor’s guilt after recent layoffs, and I can’t help the niggling worry of, “Is it irresponsible of me to take time off now?” I try to self-soothe with math: 3 months of paid time off in one chunk sounds really expensive; spread over the 5 years for sabbatical eligibility, it equates to an extra 2.4 weeks of vacation per year. That feels more reasonable to my worrying mind.

One of the podcasts I listen to put out an episode on sabbaticals just last week: Why You Should Take a Few Months Off Work (Live from SXSW) from the Happiness Lab. I was eager to listen because I knew that the host, who is a Happiness researcher, would cover the benefits of sabbaticals for personal well-being, but I suspected she would also go into the benefits for the organization providing the sabbatical. And she does. One of the biggest benefits of sabbaticals for a company, in addition to the happiness, creativity, and rejuvenation of employees when they return, is that sabbaticals result in resiliency for the organization. While I’m away, a teammate will step into the role of leading our support operations team. They’ll bring fresh ideas, build leadership skills, and become an additional source of institutional knowledge.

This makes me feel less selfish or guilty or worried or other uncomfortable feelings I feel. I don’t want to dismiss those feelings, but I also want to appreciate this unbelievable gift and not spend all my time fretting. That would defeat the purpose entirely! I’m not going to return in three months feeling refreshed and ready to bring my best to work if I spend this time worrying or decide not to take the sabbatical and burn myself out.

I’m feeling a lot of feelings right now, is the tl;dr. But the feelings I feel most are gratitude and excitement. I’ve been looking forward to this sabbatical for about two years, and I’ve been counting down the days like a student counts towards summer vacation or child counts towards Christmas day. And now the time is here.

Two truckloads of mulch will be delivered to my house on Monday. I’ll spend my first week in the garden. When I shovel mulch, pull weeds, and dig in the dirt, I become totally absorbed. The work is physical, and it clears my mind. I expect getting into my body next week will provide a clean divider between work and not work.

I expect to blog more now that I’ll have the time and space to. I’ve got some fun stuff planned: gardening, a trip to see friends, friends visiting me, and travel with my husband and our son to Paris, Lille, and Brussels to visit our daughter while she studies abroad. I’m sure I’ll find fun stuff to write about through all of that.

Meanwhile, here are some peacocks from the Dominican Republic. See you soon!

Daily writing prompt
Jot down the first thing that comes to your mind.
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Bearing witness

April 5th, 2025

This has been a hard week at work. We went through a round of layoffs, and many close colleagues are no longer by our side. Two of my teammates were let go, as well as a partner who felt like a teammate though he was on another team. Their absence feels like walking down an empty, echoing hallway. I won’t name anyone out of respect for their privacy. I want to acknowledge my deep gratitude to them and appreciation for them. They are esteemed colleagues and dear friends. I want to take this space to give my thanks to them for all they’ve helped us build. Our work going forward will be built on foundations they helped lay.
Spring in a convertible

April 1st, 2025

We put the top down and drive 55 on Lee Highway to Roanoke. White flowering trees decorate the ribbon of road in cones of cottony blooms. Forsythia erupt in saffron tangles.

Halfway to Salem, where the road is fringed more with forest than farms, the white blossoms fade away. They are replaced with the fuscia-nubbed stems of redbuds. I first see one or two peeps of pink blossoms amongst the naked brown trees of the wood. Then dozens. Scores. I see swaths of hot pink.

We’re out of the woods and back into farmland. Here’s a weeping willow with tender new leaves — the first spring green. Chartreuse strands sweep the ground, like a gnarled crone in a fairy tale, hunched over a pond. So many trees are leafing out as we come down the mountain! Here’s a magenta tulip magnolia opening its apple sized blossoms. Here’s a hedge of golden forsythia, taller than me, wide as a Volkswagen, and spraying strands of gold like firework trails along the full length of the property line. Here are tidy gold mounds of the same shrub, trimmed into bright globes at the entrance to a school.

Now the pale pink of cherry blossoms, presented on delicate airy branches, lifted to the sky, like gifts in the palm of the tree’s hand.

I sneeze from the pollen. Wisps of hair at my ears and neck — the strands that have come loose from my hat — whip in the wind. My husband taps his fingers on the gear shift in time with the music.

We bought a convertible Mazda Miata a couple of years ago, and it is an endless source of joy.

Daily writing prompt
Describe one positive change you have made in your life.
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Silly poems

March 29th, 2025

Somewhere, someone — an author, or maybe a songwriter — challenged his readers or his students (or maybe himself?) to write a 6-line rhyming poem every day. I liked the sound of this challenge. This is very different from the kind of writing I normally do. Mostly I brain dump the thoughts in my head into notebooks, I type all day at work, I message friends and coworkers, I blog. I do not rhyme, I do not (knowingly) pay attention to rhythm, I do not write verse.

Recently, our son has gotten me interested in poetry. He’s double majoring in Computer Science and English in college. Whenever I talk to him, I want to know how his English classes are going, who he’s reading, what he likes, who I should read, too. He loves T.S. Eliot, especially “The Waste Land,” so I bought a small volume of Eliot poems that I pick up every few days to read and re-read, to try to understand what’s happening. I usually do not understand.

I do understand Mary Oliver’s poetry. It is simple. It is beautiful. It blows my mind. When I read it, I shake my head in wonder. How does she do this? How does she distill the essence of life into these elegant, uncomplicated verses? Into this one line? If you have not read Mary Oliver, and you like beauty and have an interest in the evocative power of words, I recommend her. “The Summer Day” ends with a line you might recognize. “Invitation” is one of my favorites. As a morning-lover, I love her Thousand Mornings collection.

At our local bookstore, when I asked the shopkeeper if they had a writing section, and she smiled apologetically and said, “Well, yes, but there’s not usually much there,” I may have gasped and made a small clap with my hands when I saw Mary Oliver’s name on the shelf. There sat a used copy of The Poetry Handbook. I did not know this book, but I did not need to. The combination of “Mary Oliver” and “writing section” was enough for me. I bought it and stuck my nose in it even as I pushed the door open with my shoulder (because my hands held the book) and walked down the sidewalk.

From this book I’ve learned about sound, meter, rhyming patterns, and diction (word choice). Each morning for a week, I read from this book, read the example poems, then picked up Eliot again. I couldn’t get his rhythm, so I looked on Spotify if I could find anyone reading his poems. And what do you know – I found Eliot himself reading his poems. I listened to him read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady,” and now when I read the poems, I hear his lovely voice, and the soothing rhythm.

At the end of the week, after I’d finished The Poetry Handbook, my husband and I went to see the saxophonist Sarah Hanahan, and as we listened, I thought, Music and poetry are the same! They are math and they are language — they are sound, meter, pattern, and diction — and my god humans are creative and amazing and beautiful!

To add some novelty to my own writing practice, and to break me out of creative ruts, I’ve been writing 6-line rhyming poems every day for the past week or so. They’re terrible, truly. But I do have a couple of fun ones that make me laugh.

Fuck it

At some point
I’ll smoke a joint
And quit worrying about creating.

Soon
There will come a date
I’ll say fuck it, and I’ll create.

Kitty

Rattly purr
Shedding fur
You look up to my face.

Rest on my belly
You’re kind of smelly
Yet you wriggle into my heart space.

Daily writing prompt
What makes you laugh?
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Morning

March 25th, 2025

I need a desk. Not my work desk in the basement, but a writing desk with an above ground view. I’m sitting in my chair by the front window, as I do every morning after I eat breakfast. I’ve got a wooden lap board on my knees and a fat cat laying on my left arm while I try to type.

Spread all around me are books and notebooks. On the pouf at my feet are two hardcover size A5 journals — one black and ruled, one teal and dotted — and my larger softcover size B4 composition journal. Why so many? I do not know. I like notebooks. Especially these Leuchtturms that are such a pleasure to write in with fountain pens. I wish I had even smaller ones to carry in my pocket or my purse.

On the side table next to me are my water bottle, my daughter-made pink coffee mug, my all-purpose spectacles (while I wear wear my granny computer glasses), and multiple books in untidy piles. My foot is falling asleep underneath me. I can’t stretch out because of the cat and because I’ve covered all the surfaces around me with my crap. My left shoulder hurts, too. See again, cat. This chair, which isn’t ergonomically great for writing, does not help with my foot or my shoulder. But the chair is next to the window, and the natural light and view of the world trump everything else.

The world outside is a muted blue gray. The sun isn’t up yet, but it’s coming. The cloud bellies are fuchsia.

I live for mornings. Tuesdays and Thursdays are my favorite weekdays because I don’t swim. I get up early as if I were swimming, and then I have oodles of time to myself before I start my work day. After breakfast this morning, I sat with my coffee and a poetry book and read before I started writing. When I looked at the clock and saw 6:44, I was giddy because I still had over an hour until I’d log in for work. I can journal and blog with that kind of time.

I daydreamed this morning about a proper desk in a space where I want to be (ie, not in the basement or in a non-ergonomic chair). Our daughter’s room has a perfect window. Her leaving is too fresh to think about rearranging her room, though. I don’t know when any of us will be ready for that.

Daily writing prompt
What are your morning rituals? What does the first hour of your day look like?
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