A Sunday reset that … should have been obvious

I never thought I got social event hangovers until I knew what to look for. On Friday, we had an internal conference at work when I was already deeply in the thick of other activities. Normally, when my mind is divided and I’m fighting the urge to write out an essay, work is a mix of one to three meetings and then downtime for me to do focused work that’s usually centered around my email inbox, but it’s an entirely different level of effort to be fighting my brain while in a crowded conference where almost everyone is literally a coworker and where some sessions were standing room only. One reason I’ve been blogging less is that my body has decided to carry that sort of tension in my neck and shoulders, with a heavy helping of “this bright screen is too much” nausea, so I wrote out the essay (the one I put up on KALLISTI) that night on my not-lit-at-all Supernote and paused every few paragraphs to transcribe it on my laptop.

On Saturday, I went to a local outdoor art fair in the morning with a few colleagues, where I found a birthday gift for a relative. I was very excited to see a specific local jewelry-maker, who makes geometric and curvy minimalist and lunar phase jewelry. She had nothing like what I needed on her website — something that inspired the imagination with pomegranate visions — but I had faith that if I showed up, something would be there. It turned out that she’d had a sudden inspiration the day before the market to make use of a handful of tiny deep red stones that she’d just sourced — ones that look like the fruit’s juicy seed pinpricks — and I had my pick from quite a few pieces. That evening, I found out that SEIKILO had just released a piece featuring the Orphic Hymn to Hermes, which was very delightful.

On Sunday, my cats woke me up at 5:00 AM or so. I fed them and immediately went back to bed, slept through my grocery delivery, and woke up with the “you’re not up yet?!” alarm at 8:15 AM, which would have been roughly three hours into my morning had I gotten up with the cats like I usually do. I groggily brought in the groceries and cleaned vegetables, made tea, prayed to the Sun, and lounged around for far too long trying to claw the will to do anything out from where it had burrowed into a deep shell.

Eventually — very eventually, we’re talking no longer morning anymore — I ate something, showered, and went to shrine. I prayed to the household Gods. I decided to pray to Dionysos and chanted with prayer beads, which helped the remaining achey feeling subside like morning fog being lifted and dissipated as the Sun’s light strengthens. I prayed to Apollon. When I was done with that reset, I did a bit of meal prep that used up wilting peppers in my refrigerator, then did some of the work that I needed to catch up on due to the conference. I took advantage of the nice weather and went on a walk.

It’s now a fresh week, and as I said in my last post, I’ve been reading Proclus’ Republic essays on mousikē (which is sort of poetry, but sort of expansively more than poetry). It is making me think of some to-do items related to a novel rewrite that I have on my back burner, where the first step is to pull together everything in the Draft 0 that discusses Saämatsra so I can write out and work through some myths and cultic information. For the novel’s Draft 1, what I want to do is “echo” those myths down — to, like the novel’s name Ossia, create alternative passages and build something up from that foundation. It’s a time travel story as well, so on top of that, the narrative needs to have one of those dreamy, oscillating qualities, much like the way that the melodies in Debussy and Rachmaninov swell like particles’ circular motions as waves pass through the notes. And Saämatsra is also Apollon, and the entire novel is a speculative exploration in that sense, so there’s that additional weightiness to it. At the same time, work will be very busy until at least the first decad of June, and I have another story that I’m working on, so I need to pace that drive.

All of this is to say that, if you’ve noticed I’m not posting as much, things have been intense at work since our reorg. I’m still navigating how to proactively build in recovery time, and it took me more months than I’d like to admit to realize that many of the strategies I recommended in The Soul’s Inner Statues could actually be adapted to ordinary embodied logistics because I tend to get tunnel-focused on the theurgy of everything. So: that chanting intervention, the time spent cooking and clearing out, and the nice walk should have come to mind far earlier than they actually did.