Slow productivity and Spring: my new faves

Those are ducks that look like toasted marshmallows in the middle picture.

Does anyone else feel like Substack is turning into social media? Someone I read wanted people to vote on what course she should run in late spring and I just thought, damn, this feels like a fucking Instagram post. I came to Substack for writing, not to get sold courses. But there we go.

To have without holding

Marge Piercy

Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch ; to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,
conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

I can't do it, you say it's killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon raspberry,
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor's button blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.

This poem has been my favorite forever. I wrote it in paint pen on my wall in my first solo apartment back in the early 90’s. I wrote a lot of ee cummings poems on my walls too. I also microwaved a hard pretzel thinking it would turn into a soft pretzel but instead it caught on fire.

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Do you know about Cal Newport? I didn’t until last week, and now I’m listening to Slow Productivity after listening to him on 3 of my favorite podcasts. My week has been chock full of Cal Newport and I am delighted.

Listening to him talk about burnout made me think about how burnout is really just work’s rock bottom. Work addiction has been on my mind and I’m going to write about it soon.

I also loved this conversation with Nilay Patel and Hank Green: