The Island Ate My Homework
My newsletter’s summer schedule has been swinging on a wide course these days. The excuse is actually a reason: The island ate my homework!
I have no apologies. The intermittent summer schedule for this newsletter is soon coming to an end and I look forward to going back to the regularity of Sunday postings again. For now, we’re still flying rather freely through the weeks, landing intermittently with a post from time to time. I’ve been busy with many LIFE CHANGING events that form the cumulative conclusion of the summer of 2020. I’ll be outlining all of that next week. For now, all I can tell you is that we are looking toward a great new phase.
Stone photo by James K-M, New Brighton Park in Vancouver
Shift/Return
Being on Cortes, a more northern Gulf Island, was truly a beautiful reset, and a gentle time of rejuvenation and restoration. We were back briefly in the city before we left again, this time for Salt Spring, the populated southern island near Vancouver Island. When I wrote the issue Self-Islanding back in the beginning of the pandemic lockdown, we had no idea how long it would last, or how we would be changed by it all. The new ways we live in the times of the virus are becoming second nature. I feel comforted and more secure wearing a mask than not. Since we came back, I’m not so involved in the daily news cycle, and am no longer habitually doomscrolling.
On a manual typewriter, when you get to the end of a line or paragraph, maybe a little bell goes ding, and you go on to the next line, push the lever and the carriage returns. When we lost the analog typewriter (except for collectors and hipsters) and went into a virtual keyboard space, this idea of “hard return” carried over. I feel the same kind of hard return coming back from our island summer travels. At end of the line, a bell rings and a new paragraph begins. There’s continuity from the past, and a gap of space before the new section begins.
I’m looking forward now to summer’s conclusion, and I believe it will bring a new harvest, even in 2020, one of the most complex years in history. We are preparing now. As we turn toward the summer’s end, we can find hope where it’s been hiding. Embedded in all things and events, it is peeking out, sending out glimmers of potential, of possibilities. All that it asks of us is to change, step up, meet it, and act with courage. Today. Every day. No time to lose.
Celebrating 1 year of Personal Papers!
Buckets of flowers to you, dear subscribers!
Thank You So Much
I can’t believe it has been a year since I first began the Personal Papers newsletter in August of 2019. Week by week it has seen me through the last half of 2019 and into the pandemic lockdown in 2020. I am so grateful to all of you for subscribing and reading. I’m ready to continue - and I’m very glad you’ll be following along!!
(Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash)
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