In the agora
she pulls up the krēdemnon
thoughts bouncing like birds
hitting fabric boundaries
until, tired-winged, they
rest still as her tongue.Me, Twitter, 2 March 2019
I’m taking a break from Twitter and most social media until the 28th — slightly under a month. Ever since reading Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism, I have wanted to do a bit of a reset.
This doesn’t mean I will be gone from KALLISTI, though. Part of why I’m scaling back is to have some restorative silence that I can use for projects that I want to get done, including several blog posts for this site. It is difficult and exhausting to always be on, and I prefer doing most of my preliminary thinking in private.
These are periods when I decide to just leave and regroup with my books and my practices, to learn more that I can then diffuse out when the time is right. I’m also just somewhat busy right now. Most of all, I need some restorative time to focus on collecting information, reading through a backlog of things, and working through my to-do list.
Twitter may be the agora I chose, but it still exerts pressure to post that — quite frankly — I do not experience here on KALLISTI. The best thing about this blog is that I can choose when and how I want to say things. Composing poems, fiction, and essays takes time, which means I usually catch myself before saying things in essays when I am cranky, tired, or in the throes of anxiety. Tweets are short.
But people desire to have silence filled, an empty jar ready for vibrating air.
Last night, when my moratorium on Twitter began (just after the Eumenideia), I went to spin class and thought about that one Eidolon piece about spin and the Thesmophoria. For the final 2/3 of the workout, I plotted out some of the podcast monologue I am writing, Ossia, and how to describe an unconventional funerary rite.
In the silence that was not silence while I meal prepped afterward, I started singing the earth, the air, the fire, the water, return, return, return, return, which filled up space and reminded me of nights around the fire at circle when I was a child and of ritual during college. I haven’t sung it in years.
That slow filling is part of the point.
To close, I’d like to give all of you a taste of —
- Feeds I have been enjoying recently: The Unhistory of Religion, Reading My Tea Leaves, Sententiae Antiquae, and the fascinating mess in The Guardian’s “social media” tag.
- Some books: Dialect: A Game About Language and How it Dies; Proclus’ Elements of Theology; Edwin Bryant’s translation of the Yoga Sūtras; and Madeline Miller’s Circe.
- Music: Max Cooper’s One Hundred Billion Sparks, Pink Floyd’s Endless River, Peter Gabriel’s Up.
KALLISTI 