Self-Care

This week was very intense at work. We’re in the middle of orientation season, with the academic year starting immediately after that. My Calm app streak is 405 days. I brought one of the Prometheus Trust tiny poeticized books into the office for brief contemplative moments. Half of my personal to-do list is stuff that I want to get out of the way soon so I am not stressed out about life admin stuff for the next three and a half months.

Last year was the first year that I maintained my meditation app streak through the fall semester. Every year before, it had broken. So I am apparently getting better at self-care. This year, my goal is to intervene in those moments when I finish doing something with a lot of exertion, those times when everything in my head loses focus like an improperly-tuned telescope or a radio picking up static instead of words. In restorative yoga, you prop yourself up with bolsters and pillows to do passive, supported stretching. I want to figure out what my head needs for the brain version of that.

One of the reasons I may have kept my Calm streak is that, while I was writing The Soul’s Inner Statues, that part where I gave context for why everyone probably has 5-15 minutes … I realized just how much we often get too much into our heads and make excuses. Learning that casual dedicated Zen Buddhists are expected to do two hours and just what is involved in the five daily prayers (each for 5-15 minutes … so that’s 25-75 minutes/day) that any Muslim does really puts things into perspective. Essentially, you commit to the time, and you do the prayers, and you take care of your soul’s well-being by getting into a mode where you (you are the soul) can rest in the Gods. We have to be gentle with ourselves while changing habits, obviously, because this isn’t a place for negative self-talk to take the reins. Carving out time is a process, and that’s part of why the rest of the primer exists.

In a spiritual practice, we are aiming at becoming as Godlike as possible, and we are aiming at unity. Wanting my head to feel like it isn’t disintegrating is just as much a desire for unity as those moments when I’m really nailing it in focused prayer. Someone I know, the person who wrote an Egyptian theurgic guide, emphasizes everyday demiurgy way more than I do, and what he discusses is great for visualizing the vibe we want to get into when we’re being present in our connection to the Gods. I think a big part of self-development and self-care really comes down to being as capable as possible of acting from a place of unity and presence even when things are rough … and being adaptive and doing what one can to fully show up without being toxic. One of my takeaways from reading You Are Us, which is about how people fall into extremism and how they get out, is just how easy it is to develop unhealthy coping mechanisms that hurt ourselves and others, even when we think we’re doing good in the world. It’s no accident that so many of Plato’s dialogues focus on sophists and people who are mistaken about the soul and what is truly good. How do we figure out what is us and what isn’t? How do we discern between what is nourishing and what will only hurt ourselves and others?

Right now, I’m scaling back on devices outside of work (except e-ink), recalibrating some types of presence to be more prudently engaged with my family, and I’m thinking hard about other things I can implement on this helpful guide by the Center for Humane Technology. I am reading works by other Apollon devotees that I’ve been intending to read for a while now. Reading their words is joyous and cozy. We all have such unique, diamond-face views of our God, don’t we? But there’s an underlying unity, etched with the brilliance of black holes and neutron stars and life-giving Gs and the oscillations of spacetime, isn’t there? Anyway. Polytheists aren’t numerous, so we’re (mostly) self-publishing. The devotee enthusiasm/energy is great, and the occasional typos and (very sparse) errors give everything a living room conversation feel. They’re also short, so I’m well on my way to finish reading the ones on my docket just in time to disappear from the Internet into my three main learning goals for the autumn: whatever the Nobel Prize in physics science is, frolic in the Timaeus, and experience the Parmenides.

The song “Bones of Man” by Equador often earworms into my mind while I’m praying, like a riddle I’ve yet to solve, so I’ve been listening to that on repeat a lot, too. Both the original version and the Gareth Emery remix.

And I’ve been watching lectures and listening to podcasts in the evenings while organizing my Tupperware cabinet or making sure that the pantry items with soon-to-come dates are at the front so I can see them easily when I’m planning out what I want to eat. (And unfortunately recovering from a dust mite allergy reaction from me getting too overzealous about cleaning for the first time in months because things were hanging by a thread after Yoyo died, and I should have been wiping the doors down this whole time.) And daydreaming out what my plans are with writing and where I’m headed next.

The Village of Strong Branches (please review it if you’ve read it 🥺) is only the first of a few completed works I have. The next one is A Matter of Oracles. I realized this month while daydreaming that I needed to write a sequel to A Matter of Oracles, that it was the missing link between something that happens in some of my other drafts and Tilōno’s story. I know what the final word of the second story is. One of the things I’ll have to talk about on my Substack eventually is how Lattimore’s Story-Patterns in Greek Tragedy impacted the way I write and the overall feel I’m going for with what is happening in a story. Another is my decision to never directly show an active battlefield and how I need to harmonize the narrative and select characters and plot points in order to achieve that. Or the fact that I realized that every first chapter has a train in it, and I want to roll with that.

A Matter of Oracles currently needs a cover and a final read-through. I was texting with the cover artist this week and trying to make AI produce some images similar enough to what I want that they will be helpful. It was not great because AI doesn’t have that many reference images for library infrastructure, let alone science fiction library infrastructure. It doesn’t know how to respond to the prompts because problem-solving is bigger than simple pattern recognition. So I abandoned that. Meanwhile, I started daydreaming about Saämatsra — the Deity of the Steep Cliffs, Le Who Climbs the Ladder and the Dancer Who Unbinds Ler Hair When the Universe Comes to Rest and the One Upon Whose Spine the Cosmos Was Built (think a fingerboard on a stringed instrument) — instead, who is not-so-secretly my speculative fiction adoration of Apollon and an answer to people who mistake his traditional myths for the sum total of who he is. Daydreaming agalmata with AI could be the AI version of Proclus’ the-voice-is-for-hymning passage.

Leaning into spiritual practice, in other words, and prioritizing how to be creative and present, are the facets of self-care that I’m focusing on right now.