On Monday my new site, harvestingstones.com, went live. I had my first post ready and I gleefully published it, anticipating my subscribers landing on the new site this week. I checked with a subscriber to make sure the post notification email went through and linked properly to Harvesting Stones.
Photo by freddie marriage on Unsplash
No email.
Uh-oh.
Then my partner started exploring the menus and submenus, which I had checked in great detail well before the site went live, and they weren’t working properly, either.
Then I saw I had no subscribers. The subscriber list hadn’t transferred over from Our Daily Crime.
Shit!
I took a deep breath, told myself not to panic, and started figuring out what went wrong with the help of my web designer.
I discovered that somewhere in the transition some of my work on the new site had been lost, and that’s why the menus weren’t linking properly. I finished redoing that work yesterday. In the meantime, my web designer, who is far more tech savvy than I am, began troubleshooting the subscriber list issue.
When I went to bed last night, I still had no subscribers.
When I got up this morning, I had subscribers again, along with an email from WordPress tech support saying the problem was fixed.
It seems too good to be true.
As none of my subscribers were notified when my Monday post explaining why Our Daily Crime has become Harvesting Stones was published, I’m posting again. For more about the why behind this transition, read my previous post. Also, please note I’m going to begin posting on the weekends rather than midweek now.
Transition and change are hard, have you noticed? Messy and stressful and scary.
My hope is that, if you’re reading this post and you’re a subscriber, you were notified as usual via email that I published it and any links involved work as intended. If not, I’ll figure out what needs to be done and do it, and we’ll have a take 3!
Please bear with me.
Also, remind me not to move to a new domain again in future! I’m very glad I did it, but I don’t want to do it again.
None of this would have been possible without Kathy Allen at Greenlight Websites.
I’ll leave you with advice from an old tree:
Grow deep roots and welcome the wind in your branches.
When inspiration struck and I set out to build a new website for my blog and other writing, I assumed the process would move quickly. I could hardly wait to see the vision in my head become reality. I’m a happy and motivated independent learner and felt certain I could fumble with the design software and master it without much trouble, the way I did when I created Our Daily Crime.
Photo by freddie marriage on Unsplash
The software for Our Daily Crime is nearly ten years old now, a tech dinosaur. The new software requires a whole new level of skill.
I needed help. Scheduling a meeting with a professional took time. Then we had to reschedule due to a conflict. More time. I turned my attention to other things and practiced patience (not very successfully!).
In the meantime, we’ve hired a new team member at work to join us in lifeguarding, teaching, and working with patrons and patients in the pools. He’s older than I am, and he’s working hard on refining his swimming skills and learning new techniques. We’re giving him all the support and practice we can.
I admire adults who want to learn new skills. We’ve just begun to teach private swim lessons again after the pandemic, and I have two adult students. When I asked one of them what her goals were for her lessons, she said, “Not to drown,” which made me laugh.
I did eventually meet with my web designer using Zoom, and I spent an intense hour and a half taking notes, asking questions, and watching her use the design software. Since then, I’ve spent several hours working with it, and gradually I’m gaining mastery and shaping the website I dreamed of. I’m elated. Can’t wait to share it with you!
As a lifelong learner and teacher, I notice how varied our learning experience can be.
Photo by Alessio Lin on Unsplash
Context matters. I was wretched during my public school years. My goals were to achieve good grades to meet the expectations of my family and graduate. Any pleasure in the learning itself, for its own sake, suffocated under the long nightmare of those years. Graduation meant nothing to me, and I would have ignored it if I’d been allowed. My reward was surviving.
College was no better. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t belong there. Once again, I went through the motions of pleasing others and living up to expectations, two hellish years of depression, social isolation, and suicidal ideation before I dropped out.
I still wince when I think of the money wasted.
Somehow the joy of learning has been distorted into competition, capitalism, and perfectionism. Everyone doesn’t have equal access to education and educational tools. Many people don’t complete high school, let alone higher education. We don’t talk about education in terms of enhancing our lives and making ourselves bigger. We talk about getting a good job, making a lot of money (or not), and school loans. Capitalism defines success.
Worst of all, if we happen to be interested in literature, writing, religion, music, theater, philosophy – liberal arts, in other words – we’re steered away from those interests because “they” say we can’t earn a living pursuing them. I’ve got news for you. You can’t make a living as a librarian or medical transcriptionist, either.
Apparently, education is not valuable unless it leads to making a certain amount of money.
Photo by Brandon Wilson on Unsplash
On the other hand, many learners in our communities are in it for the fun of learning something new. Their goals are about real life, as opposed to the construct of consumerism. They don’t want to drown. They want to do a job they’ve never done before and so learn new skills. They want to use technology as a tool to support their passion. Adult learners know learning enhances life. They’re not coerced into learning; they seek it out.
It’s a lot easier and more fun to teach someone who wants to learn than it is someone who’s having learning thrust upon them.
Adult learners have lived long enough to know how to learn. Not how to compete, how to cheat, how to work the system, how to manipulate good grades and references, and how to create their own personal perfectionistic demons, but how to learn. Adult learners also know something about how they best learn, and are able to communicate their needs and goals.
Learning requires time, patience and practice. It takes courage to seek new skills. It’s messy. We make mistakes, flounder, and fail. Good adult learners persist anyway, pursuing their creativity or passion, satisfying their curiosity and desire for mastery.
I’ve had the good fortune to know and work with wonderful teachers who have inspired, encouraged, and challenged me. I’ve also known destructive teachers who permanently damaged my trust, confidence, and sense of self-worth. The difference between them, I’m convinced, has nothing to do with their level of education or training, but rather with their power management. Good teachers seek to empower their students. Destructive teachers not only refuse to share their power, they actively disempower their students.
Healthy communities support learning and teaching, not necessarily as a formal process, but as a natural one. As a teacher, I know my students give me at least as much as I give them. Teaching and learning are collaborative, a sharing of power. To teach is to learn. To learn is to teach. Passing on my love of swimming doesn’t change the world, but it’s a contribution I can make joyfully.
Everyone succeeds when we teach and learn together.
One of my coworkers and his wife had a baby girl yesterday.
I’m thinking about them, and remembering the birth of my own first child.
Photo by Khoa Pham on Unsplash
Creating something new. What a magical process, and what an anchor to our humanity.
What a terrifying, exhausting, consuming act it is to make oneself into a creative vessel, and then, when the time is right, deliver what we’ve conceived and made into the world.
Creativity, it seems to me, is the ultimate act of faith in the world, faith in the future, faith in ourselves and others.
Faith can be hard for me. Trust is even harder.
Yet I am compelled to create, just as I felt compelled to be a mother.
I forget sometimes that creativity is a journey from conception through patience and labor to, ultimately, delivery.
Except delivery, of course, isn’t the end of the journey, but the beginning of a new one.
About a month ago (I had to look back in my notes – it seems like a year ago!) I suddenly decided I wanted to redesign and uplevel this blog.
Step by step, I’ve been working toward that goal ever since, in a daze of inspiration and creativity. I’ve made sketches and notes, researched other popular and award-winning blogs for design ideas, sorted through hundreds of images, written word lists, created new categories for my content, and worked with a web designer.
Photo by Stephen Leonardi on Unsplash
It’s going to be beautiful. I wish I could show you the inside of my head as a preview!
It’s also going to be wider in scope, more ambitious, and more authentically expressive.
Creativity forces us to be bigger, and that’s uncomfortable. Once your belly has stretched over a baby, it’s forever changed. There’s no going back.
In order to create my new website, I need to step beyond my comfort zone in several ways, and stretch, and fall back on patience, trust, faith, and resilience.
It’s a stony road, but the vision in my head is so compelling I don’t always notice.
Today, a day off from my bread-and-butter job, was The Day I was going to finally start building the site. All the pieces are in place, all the elements collected. I’ve watched tutorials on using the software I chose to build with. I could hardly wait to start.
Starting looked like opening everything up and sitting in front of the screen without a clue.
For three hours I struggled with more tutorials, trying to find definitions for terminology, and trying to understand how to use this amazing, beginner-friendly, software!
I paused and emailed my web designer. I’m going to need help. We made an appointment for the end of the month.
I don’t want to wait that long. I dove back in. Surely I can figure this out!
At the point I felt torn between hurling the laptop out the window or bursting into tears (maybe both), I set my notes and the laptop down on my work surface (gently!) and walked away.
Sometimes there’s nothing else to do.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
I went outside and sat in the sun. It’s a gorgeous day, sunny and warm. It’s also the height of black fly season, and I’m half demented and a little sick from several vicious bites incurred earlier in the week. I’ve always had trouble with insect venom, and it’s unbelievable how savage these tiny insects can be. If you’ve never experienced them, you won’t know what I’m talking about, and I can’t adequately explain.
Anyway, right now it doesn’t pay to linger, uncovered, in the sun, but I gave myself a few minutes to enjoy the birds, the new green growth, and the warmth while I struggled with my frustration.
I thought of that new baby, and I sighed.
Creation takes time.
Conception, labor, delivery, and whatever comes after, take time.
Living creatively is a journey, not a destination.
It is, after all, a day off. Am I going to choose to beat my head against this wall or leave it and go on to something else, like writing this post?
The post I wanted to write was the introduction to my new site!
(For the beginning of this series of posts, inspired by Allan Savory’s book, Holistic Management, begin here.)
Photo by Ludde Lorentz on Unsplash
Allan Savory’s holistic decision-making process “ends” with a feedback loop of planning (assuming the plan is wrong, as in planning for failure), monitoring, controlling, and replanning.
So, having spent a couple of months working with this model and writing about it, what have I got? Where am I?
I have no idea! I feel like I’m in the middle of a hairball.
Using Savory’s template is not the problem. It’s elegant, logical, effective, and sustainable. It’s a model based on power-with and win-win.
It’s effective because learning the process has successfully excavated resistance, blocks, and unconscious beliefs that are and have always been obstacles for me in all areas of my life. Until and unless I deal with my internal landscape, neither this process nor any other will work for me.
As I think about defining my creative output and consider how to get it in front of those who would find value in my work, I’m forced into a narrow focus. I’m forced into choice and commitment.
In the beginning, starting Our Daily Crime and writing my books was an act of defiance. I had no expectations at all. My motivation was to express myself honestly in spite of what anyone thought or said.
Photo by Bryan Minear on Unsplash
Now, years later, I’ve created a body of work, grown from those first bitter seeds of defiance. I discover I’ve written a blueprint, a map for reclaiming and managing personal power through emotional intelligence. It’s not finished. It will never be finished. Not everyone wants it, or can use it.
But some people do, and can. People like me.
Who are they? Where are they? How do I find them?
Upon waking this morning, dimly hearing peepers in the pond (Spring!), a robin, and a couple of barred owls, I had this thought:
I cannot be/give/do/create anything that anyone wants.
To say that’s a belief is completely inadequate. It’s a law of nature, like gravity, immutable, everlasting, absolutely indestructible.
It’s a belief underlying my whole life.
Is it true?
Panic stations! It doesn’t matter. I refuse to answer that question right now.
OK, I said to myself. Let me ask you this: If it were not true, how would you find your audience?
Now, that’s a question I can work with!
I would have fallen on Our Daily Crime and its content with joy and relief, had I found it eight or ten years ago. It’s exactly the support and resource I needed.
I well remember how I started on the journey of emotional intelligence and power reclamation. I know where I’ve found my people – and where I haven’t. I follow several people who add value to my life and serve as teachers, guides, and examples of simplicity, honesty, and effective marketing. They have found their audience.
I can find mine, too.
If I empower the belief I have nothing to contribute that anyone wants, I’m at the end of possibility as a writer. If I acknowledge the belief and work around it anyway, I’m in a new world of unexplored, unimagined possibilities, and Savory’s model provides me with a decision-making tool that allows me to pursue my own joy and success, remain cooperative and authentic, and maintain healthy connections with others. Everybody wins.
From Seth Godin: “When we adopt the posture of commitment, something extraordinary happens: The lessons get more profound and useful. The questions asked get more specific and urgent. The connections that are made get deeper.”
Photo by Ludde Lorentz on Unsplash
“The discipline is to invest one time in getting your workflow right … Hacking your way through something “for now” belies your commitment to your work …”
This year I decided I was going to build a more secure life over the next three years, and I began to work on a business writing plan using a holistic management template created by Allan Savory. I’ve been writing about this process as I grope my way through it.
I’ve spent a great deal of time asking myself questions, writing notes, identifying obstacles, defining the whole I’m trying to manage, listing resources, outlining my holistic context, and thinking about interconnection and ecosystems.
A concatenation of recent events and more closely identifying my needs and resources led me to find a new hosting company and migrate the blog from one host to another.
My skill level is way below this kind of data transfer, so I researched and chose a new hosting company, gave them my credit card number, and sat back to let the tech wizards do their thing.
After the transfer, everything looked good. I had a minor problem with my header image that was obvious and easy to fix. I immediately went back to weekly posting and plodding through SEO work.
A week ago, it came to my attention that all my internal links, the links from one of my posts to another, were broken. This amounts to thousands of links, and is a major catastrophe for SEO rankings.
I had chosen the new hosting company based on, among other services, the availability of 24/7 tech support and their advertised expertise with WordPress, which is the platform for this blog. Everything had worked perfectly on the old server and I was sure this link problem was a glitch in the transfer process. I called tech support.
Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash
I called tech support three times that day, in fact. I explained the problem to each person, gave them examples, and told them what I’d done with the previous support person, but I quickly lost track of who was suggesting what changes and got more and more confused and desperate with each call. I followed all recommendations. Nothing fixed the links.
I struggled all week with tech support, in between work shifts and a power outage. I didn’t post or do SEO work, because I began to have trouble even signing in to WordPress, let alone working on the blog.
Later in the week, during my fifth call, the support person said that she’d never seen links break the way mine had before, she didn’t know what to do, and the hosting company doesn’t actually work on internal links anyway! But to please call back if I continued to have problems and would I stay on the line and take a short survey about my support experience?
The depth of my distress over this is hard to overstate. I had not realized how much this space means to me until it seemed to be irrevocably broken. It’s not that I have a big audience or an intimate social community around it. It’s not that I get a lot of comments or feedback. It’s not that I think it will make me rich.
I think it’s that this writing is the most authentic, truthful thing I do in the world that’s in the public view. It’s also a significant exercise in self-discipline, courage, and commitment. I love my paid job and the people I work with, but I’ve had many beloved jobs and made satisfying contributions in my work before now. I am not the job.
Photo by Nicole Mason on Unsplash
I am the writing. The threat of losing it made me realize how meaningless my life would seem without it.
The part of me that’s so good at stepping back and observing from the corner of the ceiling has been watching all this. In trying to take some forward action and gathering the courage to make a true commitment, financially, internally and publicly, the blog broke. The financial commitment of a new hosting company didn’t pay off. I couldn’t find the support I needed. Not only that, whatever went wrong wasn’t a normal problem, but something (supposedly) never seen before. All my old beliefs about being a burden and broken in profound, ugly, and no-help-for-you ways sprang into life again.
One of my goals is to build a support team for my writing. Was this a message that my writing and I are not worth supporting and will never be successful? Was it a message that there is no support for such as me and I must find a way to learn and do it all?
I was beyond discouraged.
Then, in less than an hour, an extremely bizarre string of events occurred. My partner unearthed the business card of a web designer from whom we bought drums off of Craig’s List about five years ago. We met her in a parking lot in Portland. She and my partner hit it off and she handed him her card. He came home and added it to one of his innumerable piles.
He remembered that card, found it (perhaps the biggest miracle of all), called her at GreenLight Websites, and left a message. She called him back, he explained the problem, gave her the login information, and within half an hour she emailed me that the links were fixed. The fix had been so quick and easy, she said she didn’t need any money for her work.
I checked, in between mopping my face and blowing my nose, which I’d been doing for days. She was right. The links were fixed. Free of charge.
The links were fixed!
In the process of leaving a review for her business, we realized she hosts as well. Her prices are much higher than the host company I originally chose, as money is a very limited resource for me right now, but she specializes in WordPress (backed up by action this time), she’s local, she’s a successful female small business owner with an amazing portfolio, she’s a drummer, she has green hair, and she’s my age. She also does all kinds of web design and consulting.
We considered for about 10 seconds before deciding to host with her.
Nowhere on my wish list of a writing support team was a web designer and consultant. I’ve been looking for an agent, editor and publisher.
Photo by Bryan Minear on Unsplash
I’ve lived long enough to recognize this as one of those completely unexpected journeys we take as we’re carefully plotting and planning a straight line move from A to B. I made a commitment, and those who know me well will tell you once I make up my mind everyone might just as well get out of my way. I think Godin is right, though. The act of making the commitment causes things to start happening.
It was not my plan to start spending significant amounts of money before figuring out how to make some money, but here I am.
It was not my plan to include a web specialist in my support team, but here I am.
It was not my plan to have the blog break down and temporarily undo all my hard SEO work, but it happened anyway.
Progress is a funny thing. Sometimes it looks like collapse, breakdown, and reversal. Often, it’s not going in the direction we had in mind, but in another direction entirely. The purpose of Savory’s model is to accommodate unexpected, edge-of-chaos events and unintended consequences in whatever our situation is.
