Passing on Plans

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Well, this blog's two-year anniversary has come and gone, passing by swiftly with nary a post. Oops! The past month has been absolutely full of surprises, joys, stresses and nerve-wracking wonderment. That up-coming post on the role of imagination in practical polytheism, which believe it or not I began brainstorming on the very first day of February, has yet to be written... still lurking somewhere between the sloppy notes and the sloppier outline stages.

That's the funny thing about plans. Sometimes, they happen, sometimes they don't. Today, I am awaiting the arrival of a person I have been wanting to meet for quite a while now, a person who only a few months ago was merely another acquaintance among many online. By this evening, I hope to call him a "firl" (that's "friend in real life," for those unfamiliar with the latest interwebs lingo that I just made up). That certainly wasn't in any of my plans.

In fact, over the past several years, I've found myself shying further and further away from plans. All through my childhood and adolescence, I was painfully aware, as many people probably were, of how overly structured and future-focused my life always seemed. Do well in middle school so you got into the top track in high school. Do well in high school--AP courses, extracurriculars, top grades and enough diversity in hobbies and friends so that you didn't appear "one sided"--and you were on your way to an excellent college. Do well in college... well, that one's obvious. Or so I thought. Do well in college, and you'll get a good job or an acceptance letter into your top-pick of graduate school. Which is exactly what I did get. And I went for a semester, and found myself hating it. (Do well in grad school and pay through the nose so that, what? I can be pruned and indoctrinated for a job in academia that I don't really want to begin with? No thanks.) A few years later, and here I am, former valedictorian-distinguished-interdepartmental-honors girl, waiting tables part-time and swinging through my life day to day like some Jane in the jungle... and absolutely adoring it. To hell with plans.

Now, I don't mean to say that I don't have goals. Most certainly I have goals, which are distinctly different from plans. But my goals these days usually involve things like regular practice, patience, baby steps forward into the ever-fluidic future. A goal is a spot on the horizon towards which you travel, walking or running or dancing, however you feel like moving on any given day. A plan, that's something else. A plan is a moment-by-moment instruction, a list, a schematic. Those diagrams with monotone shoe-prints and numbered arrows that claim to show you how to waltz, now that's a plan. You can get places with plans, of course, but you might be too busy with your eyes on your feet to see where it is you're going.

So here I am, today. The past few days have been chockfull of plans. To keep myself from being nervous about this upcoming visit, I set myself a checklist of spring cleaning projects. Scrubbing down the bathroom, tearing apart the kitchen to clean every nook and cranny, even washing and polishing my hardwood floors. I went to the grocery store and the bank. I planted seeds (rosemary, lavender and chamomile). I finished up a few torn curtains that needed stitching. I dusted and refreshed all my various altars, shrines and home decor arrangements. I did as many loads of laundry as I could honestly justify being a single woman with a limited wardrobe (seven). Now, it's just past six-thirty in the evening, and I've run out of things to do. The past two days have been lost in a blur of work, planning and replanning, checking off lists and adding to them. The apartment is clean and smelling of cleansing incense. The laundry is finished and the towels and sheets are folded, the bed is made, the pillows in the living room are tastefully arranged.

I feel as though I've missed something.

Plans have excellent uses. It's hard not to make plans, to give in to that compulsion to organize and categorize, especially when you have something to look forward to. It's been a long time since I had something, some new unknown, to look forward to, to anticipate with a mix of excitement and bewilderment. Having exhausted every recourse to thoughtless busy-ness and work, I think now I will try something else: I will sit inside my anticipation, savoring the coming unknown. I will attend to this moment, right here, right now. I will cherish this bewilderment, this utter lack of preparation that I have cultivated with my willful distraction. I will live my life, just as is this very hour, and I will absolutely adore it.

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It seems for the moment my writing fervor has died down a bit. Spring fever is kicking into overdrive as temperatures dropped back into the teens over this past week and the sun persists in mocking me, knocking coldly, brightly against my tightly-closed and wind-rattled apartment windows. How I miss day-dreaming and hillwalking! It's hard to fight the body's urge to rush from one warm place to another, to numb the need to be out with music and DVDs and books.... I miss my warm days in the park, long hours watching the dogs and the ducks and the people, allowing my mind to wander. If attending classes all through high school and college was good for anything, it was good for enforced day-dreaming time. Gazing out those uniform panes of glass while the lecture rolled, letting classroom debate spark ideas and jotted margin notes while I slumped in my seat shuffling my restless legs back and forth. Those were the days... Now, it seems i've grown too skilled at keeping myself occupied. You have to, when your day-job dominates your short-term memory center with drink orders and the "usual" of a dozen or more regulars swinging by for breakfast each morning; and your time-off demands carpe diem commitment to self-directed study and learning and writing. I can't believe I'm even saying this, but I almost miss my days of institutional learning. Ah, to be a student again, a real student, somebody else's student... and to have nothing more required of me than to sit and think and day-dream for a while.

But why I'm really writing now is to ask you a favor. Yes, I mean you, my wonderful loyal readers. At the moment, I'm making an honest, nose-to-the-grind-stone effort to put together a book manuscript for publication, a collection of essays on spirituality and the Druid path, much like the kinds of posts here. So, I'd like to ask you a question or two, receive some feedback to help me out as I think about where such a collection might go, how it might hang together, what it might include. Of course, I love you all already, so I can't blackmail or bribe you into responding. But it would warm my heart and itch my brain to hear from you. After all, why even bother to write a book except to speak to readers out there about the things we care about?

So. Without further ado...

(a) What have been your favorite posts in this blog over the past almost-two years, and why? Which posts might you like to see included and/or expanded in a print format?

(b) What would you like to see more of? If you picked up a "book by Ali" in the bookstore and flipped through its table of contents, what kinds of things would you really be hoping to find, what subjects or styles would just thrill you to the bone to read and to share with others?

See, that's it. Just two little questions. Not so bad! And I promise to adore each of you even more than I do now, as difficult as that might seem, and to take you to the candy store for your pick of penny candy when we're done. Meanwhile, I'm still working on a post or two about polytheism and approaches to deity, so those will be up eventually. That, at least, is a promise I can keep.