Currently writing to avoid doing a hard thing

…is anyone else paperwork avoidant?

The prompt writing is after the 🪅🪅🪅 and the daily sorting after the 💖💖💖

🪅🪅🪅

Write an acrostic poem with the word celebrate

Can we pause a moment, I can’t breathe

Everyone is cheering

Loud

Everyone seems to know what’s going on

But I’m sitting in the corner, overwhelmed

Retreating within

Asking with my whole body, why are we yelling

Tell me please

Elaborate for clarity

💖💖💖

I can tell I’m stressed because the one above shows me I am.

I want to celebrate. I’m opening my new space, softly and without fanfare, this weekend. It is full of tables, chairs, furniture.

But there is no cash register, or things to sell. It is a space for being. For making art. For writing.

Today I had signed up for a marketing workshop for folks who don’t like traditional marketing. It was supposed to be a full day affair.

But last night I had a panic attack thinking about it. I’ve been community building for a very long time. I don’t remember not doing it. I was the child in our neighbourhood who would create grand adventures for us to go on.

I ran my first fundraiser when I was sixteen years old. That was 30 years ago. I helped build communities around slam poetry, comedy, storytelling, parenting, the arts…until I just wanted a spot where I could sit, and make space, and people could come and do quiet beautiful things and meet other gentle people doing lovely things.

But community is not about the Is involved, it’s about engaging with something that is missing. It’s about offering space. It’s about listening.

But today I couldn’t go and listen to someone tell me HOW to get people to come to my new space. I don’t want there to be droves of people. I want the beginning of what I’m doing to be a slow trickle, like a dry creek at the end of summer. A slow start, and I never want it to be rushing.

In my inbox sits a yellow highlighted list of paperwork I need to send to my new accountant firm.

The amount of money, time and paperwork starting, or even re-starting a business is phenomenal. Especially if you are, and I am, just one person doing the thing.

I have to admit here…that I have never really been good in large groups. The amount of differing opinions that people have, the advice, the “if you just did this”…it drags my energies to the floor before I even get out the door.

I can facilitate, and build, but once it’s a living breathing community able to survive on its own…I have to let it go. Like a parent teaching its young to go out on its own, if that gosling can’t survive on its own…it might not survive at all. This narrative is built into me. That however is ableist. Because some goslings will always need the help of the other geese. This metaphor is getting mixed up. Because a community is a group. Not a single person.

Let me try again.

I build communities because I seek belonging. But in the end, I am always outsider. And that’s okay. I am comfortable watching from this position. I am happier being just ever so adjacent with the other outsiders. Watching the ‘in’ group.

I love people. But often the excessive demands and needs I can feel always drain me.

My mother used to have to drive a woman into school every day. Someone who talked so much my mother couldn’t think.

When my mother told me she had started driving in on her own, I asked her why. I was young, not even 12.

To protect my peace, she said. The drives are the part of the day where I think about what I will teach, and the way home is where I think about the day before I get home and have to be “mom” again.

My mother taught me by example to protect my peace.

I have friends who read this newsletter, and I want to assure them that our friendship brings me joy. That I am ever grateful for the people who see me and who let me see them. For our chats. Our texts. Our thoughts shared back and forth.

I have learned that sometimes peace comes from finding the people who make your whole brain and body energized and relaxed; simultaneously.

Last night my new friend and her husband dropped off a whole truckload of furniture and things for children to do at the new space. She is generous of spirit and none of her gifts felt like they came with demands.

As she was leaving she reached out her hands. She said “do you want me to give you the warning that is in my heart?”

I took her hands.

Watch out for the people who will try to harm you, or the people who want to harm the children who come through these doors. They will come, they always do.

…and I know this to be true.

In every community I’ve ever been in there have been dangerous people.

30 years in, I’m more attuned to it. But I don’t want to stop community building out of fear. I want people to feel safe and welcomed.

This Saturday and Sunday I will softly be opening the doors of my space, unsure what it will become.

My friend talked about how a festival that her organization ran last year took hundreds of days of planning, and over 30 volunteers over a weekend to run. How beautiful and fulfilling it was but how much work.

Running Curious & Kind will be a bit like that. A daily small festival of strange wondrous moments to be had.

Next July my lease will run out.

Ten months of running a most-daily quiet festival of wonder…that sounds just about right.

I can breathe again. The paperwork is a surmountable challenge. It is. I’ve got this.

Heart,

Wake

(A picture of the front window of the space. A gorgeous photograph by a talented friend. A strange bunny statue from a local shop, a mini rainbow tea set by another phenomenal artist near town, and a birdhouse from Yarmouth. The shop is full of storied items that aren’t for sale. Things people can come visit that help create the magic of the space.)