The Man Was Alone in a Night Landscape

Disappearing for a while

The Man Was Alone in a Night Landscape, Odilon Redon

I'm going to take some time off from writing here. Exactly how much time I don't know. But some. At least a month. Paying subscribers will not be billed during the break, as I paused billing earlier this week.

From time to time, I dream of disappearing, which makes me not want to write, which makes me wonder who I am. What's left without the writing? I don't know the answer. I'm not even sure that there is one, or that it matters if there is. Our current obsession with identity—the often shallow and disingenuous and immovable public form that it has assumed—irritates me greatly, so I'm going to try to avoid adding to it. These are matters for the heart and skull and soul.

What I know now is this: I have a strong desire to read and listen and be quiet for a while, to learn and grow and go largely unseen, to let my mind change as often as it likes without feeling a need to explain, to sleep and breathe and eat and exercise better, to be more present with the real people I know, as well as myself, and to spend more of my time moving in nature and less of it trapped in screens.

When my desire to write again grows too strong to ignore, as it always eventually does, you'll be the first to know.

Until then, poof.

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