A Spiralic Journey

is Substack a clique? am I a writer?

Greetings! The Ancestral Homekeeper is a newsletter dedicated to slow & simple living for all of us. I’m Kristina, and I believe that the way we shape our lives at home will be reflected in our society at large. By blending the wisdom of our ancestors with contemporary thoughts on mental health, self nurturing, and social justice, we can find the path to changing our world. New letter is out most Sundays!

I’ve decided that if podcasts and television shows can have seasons, then so can newsletters. Welcome back to Season Two of the Ancestral Homekeeper! I have always preferred the Irish goodbye, leaving a party with nothing more than a few words of gratitude for the host, and I suppose that is what I have done here. I hope you have had as joyful of a holiday and New Year season as has been possible. I’m back and I will be here for you (most) every Sunday.

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My attention is darting, unable to sit still. The eyes of a cat, watching a bird fly back and forth across the front yard. A small child, presented with a plate stacked high with sweets and fruits cut into the shapes like glistening gems. I slip in my sound-reducing earplugs and take a deep breath. No space or time to mediate, not just yet. What’s the next step?

It’s an eternal question I ask myself. The image of living life in a spiralic way instead of the linear way is one that is burned into my being (profound gratitude to Lindsay Mack for this teaching, and many others). So the next step or two might not always make sense if one is living in the traditional manner — with all steps proceeding in an orderly fashion until one reaches the goal in the distance. The path is always clear, and you can see it stretching out before you, getting smaller as it reaches that point that is just on the knife-edge of your vision. So when we fail to take the steps we know to be right there in front of us, it can feel like a crushing failure.

The idea that the path of life is a spiral and not a straight line is not a new one. Everyone, from artist whisperer Julia Cameron to numerous tech bros, has picked up on the vines planted by the indigenous peoples that first lived on the North American continent. As we move through the spiral, marked by the seasons, our life naturally ebbs and flows. Sometimes we arrive at a particular part of our journey and we are tempted to think,

‘Ah, I’ve been here before. I have regressed. I can’t believe I am heartbroken/sick/broke/unemployed/drinking/alone, again.’ If we look at life in a linear fashion, it can indeed appear as if we have been set back on our journey. However, every time we experience something again, we carry the wisdom of our past selves into the situation. We are definitively older, the earth is older. Though it may feel exactly the same, the situation is changed in marked ways. We are simply at the next curve of the spiral, where things indeed look familiar, though we have never been on this particular stretch of path before.

Photo by Jez Timms on Unsplash

My attention is settling into this place in front of my computer. I am thinking deeply about a subject that I’m passionate about. I question my use of adverbs and go back, trying to edit before my thoughts are even fully out on the page. This never goes well. The next step on my journey is not going back to my words! I have to keep pushing forward and writing more, so that when my essay is complete, I may go back and edit effectively. The loop on the spiral must be allowed to come back around.

How many places in my life can I apply this image? My career as a whole? My journey through motherhood, as my children make yet another transition in their own lives as… big kids? My marriage? Our perpetually under-construction home, which is somehow seeing remarkable progress and yet I still do not have a fully functioning kitchen, a year and a half in? No matter how many sights I may see on these ventures, there are never setbacks. Just similarly angled viewpoints as I reach a new curve in the spiral.

What is the next step for my writing, for my presence here? The views I am seeing from my little place on Substack feel dangerously familiar. This feels a bit like when I started my first blog in 2009, when you could only be noticed by commenting on other people’s blogs or linking to theirs within your own work. I felt late to the party there and hated the obviously transactional nature of the Comments To Get Noticed strategy. There are definitely echoes of that here. I’m also getting a little déjà vu from my first foray into using Instagram for my professional ventures, back in… 2018? I was perhaps naïve in thinking I could be immune to the comparison trap, and the constant scrolling, and the drive to GROW, the groups of women supporting each other that feels to the outsider like high school cliques — all things I feel creeping up here in Substack as well.

me on a family forest adventure this January

But I remind myself that though this all feels familiar, it is a whole new loop to traverse. I carry the wisdom from my past into this discipline of writing every week. I write every week not just for little hearts, comments, and new subscribers, but for the ancient practice of writing as a personal discipline. Can I afford to just “write for myself” on Substack, instead of pouring my time and energy into YouTube, where my audience is over 700 times larger and is fully monetized?

I don’t think I can afford not to. I am in my 40s now (!) and it’s time to return to the dreams I have carried since I was a little girl. Growing up in a home where I was often neglected, alone, and scared, I had two dreams that sustained me. First, I wanted to be a writer. And second, I wanted to get married and have children and a house and stability and safety. I wanted to feel loud, expressive love, a home full of laughter and joy. My goodness, did I manifest this second dream — so effectively that I wear those noise-reducing earplugs for most of my waking hours!

And while one could say that my career in marketing and public relations was the smart way of getting paid to write, I don’t think I’ve ever felt comfortable calling myself a writer. Though I have written on the internet for a decade and a half, I am still not a writer. Though my work has been published in both local and national outlets, I am still not a writer. Though I have legitimately cashed old-school paper checks — money that has been paid to me for writing stories under my own byline — I am still not a writer. Will I consider myself a writer if I publish a book? What if it is self-published under my own imprint? Will I delegitimize that and continue to call myself a not-writer? Will anything short of a fairytale dream contract with a Big 5 publisher finally allow me to step into the role of writer? What if I get into one of those MFA programs that I secretly lust after?

If I am to abide by my own wisdom, I need to recognize this place in my own spiral. I keep coming back here because the lesson hasn’t been learned. I am a writer, because I write. There are entire rooms full of people who read what I write, and a small stadium’s worth who will watch me bake a pie and listen to my words in a voiceover.

The children a fully awake, clamoring for Sunday morning pancakes. It’s time to live my other dream this morning. Take care of yourselves on this spiralic journey, loves.

on of this month’s sourdough loaves