Quaint Sort of Giddiness

 

I’m hoping the video actually plays. A little reel from the weekend. June every year is dominated by watering, and this year, the garden expansion is making for even more if it. Throw in chicken house retrofitting, the chickens themselves, new veggie experiments, and the usual horse chores, and my schedule is dominated in the mornings and evenings by outdoor activities, the heat of the day devoted to writing and blogging and other work-work stuff. 

While putting this reel together today, I was reminded of the ways that farm chores are immediately satisfying in a way that writing isn't. Writing requires a lot of time-intensive mental work, but at the end of the day, all you have to show for it is that ever-expanding word count number in the corner of the screen. An accomplishment, to be sure, but an intangible one - one you can't fully enjoy until the whole book is done. It's also an accomplishment that carries the burden of outside opinion. You always ask yourself: "When I finish this, after the months I spent on it, will people buy it? Will it have been worth my time? Will they like it?" Those are questions you have to ignore in order to get the writing done, but like an unfinishable homework assignment, authorship is the gift that keeps on giving anxiety. After a long day of writing, I'm left more anxious, rather than less. 

Farming, by contrast, leaves you physically exhausted, but mentally refreshed at the end of the day. Before I tried my hand at plant farming, and before I wrote books for a living, I taught riding lessons, trained horses, and managed a 20-stall horse farm. That was a much more demanding job, in a physical respect, and I was in charge of a living being's health, so a much more important job, but, despite its daily repetitions, there's something beautiful in the small ways all things farm-related offer satisfaction. Yes, it takes a long time to create a partnership with a horse; it takes years to make overall progress in your riding, just as it takes years to grow a garden. But the daily chores give up little, daily rewards. The gleam and beeswax scent of a saddle you've just cleaned; the crisp look of fresh mulch you've just put down; the way peonies look on your counter after you've cut them; the satisfaction of a freshly-mucked stall, and new shavings; a bathed horse; the sounds of contented hay-munching while you trim a mane or comb the tangles from a tail. There's a pure kind of joy in a mown lawn, and a weeded flower bed; a quaint sort of giddiness in eating a tomato you've grown yourself. 

For all its rewards, writing is an activity that, over time, frazzles, rather than soothes; its lows can remind you all too clearly of the cruelty of human nature. It's the humble, routine tasks of outdoor life that bring you back to yourself, that help you feel as if this one thing you're doing, in the moment, matters. A happy plant, a happy pet, a happy you, amidst the scent of roses and the drone of bees. 

It's that feeling I'm trying to bring to my writing each day, as I tackle Dartmoor X. Every day, I try to find a small thing that feels like it's just for me in the day's word count; some indulgent tidbit that leaves me able to look back on the scenes I've written and feel accomplished. Today, it was a scene involving Ava and Mercy's kids, Remy in particular. He's such a stoic little grownup already, and watching Maggie and Ava feel proud of him, seeing how far they've all come as a family, made me proud. If the small things create small joy in the farm aspect of my life, then I need to try to capture that in the writing part of my life, as well. That quaint sort of giddiness. I need more of that.