So, um, hello. Been a while, hasn’t it? Looks to be just over one calendar year since I posted anything to this page.

It’s also been just over one calendar year since I created anything I felt was worth talking about, but that, my friends, is changing.

I told my publisher and friend a while ago that I had gone back into therapy, and I have to level with you. Hearing her tell me she was proud of me for doing so made a bigger difference than she could have realized. Words mean a lot to me. They always have.

While that encouragement is important, the fact is that only I can do the work that stopped so long ago. I see people everywhere online doing so. How much music is being made? How many words are being written? How many writers, performers, costumers, photographers, leatherworkers, mapmakers, worldbuilders, sketchers, and digital artists do I follow and envy every day?

I pushed myself away from the only table where I’ve felt I truly belonged, and chose a bog of my own cultivation. By ignoring the nobility of effort, the dignity of work, the excitement of learning, I did not just slip away from creativity.

I slunk away, under my own power.

Success, to me, looks like attention. That’s hardly a surprise to me and shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who knows me. But …

It is the Attention Age. When I realized just how many people were shouting into the void about efforts and work which I judged less worthy than my own, I became disillusioned. Twitter became a nightmare void of incorporeal shoggoths, babbling from a thousand mouths at once, trumpeting the end. Hashtags are fun to play with, but people using the same tag on every post become dull as February ice, gray and worn and never-changing. I can’t abide it, and I fear becoming an obsidian mirror of sameness, I fear being lost in these endless tides which move and shake but do nothing in the end.

And when I compare myself to those whose work I adore – the wondersmiths and wendigos, the ministries of constant love and constant hope, the furious lions of political change, the sheer volume of prolific authors, the youthful vigor of success – ah, how much more do I despair? Because I tell you something true, I haven’t believed I deserve to sit at that end of the table.  Slink away, little charlatan, and lose yourself in the mosses and cattails of your beloved bogs.

Yet … still.

Yet still, I want to watch the light of creation stream through every window of my home. I want to see the waters glow, streaked violet and naranjine from firefly skies, to watch the fire pour from eyes and fingers and chakras. I want to feel the chariot pulling me forward, pulling us all forward, riding everywhere and nowhere for the simple joy of moving, dancing along with the invisible driver as music fills the endless air.

I am so, so tired of slinking. I am tired of the nails I’ve driven into my own eyes and hands.

I don’t think I’m alone. So if you needed a message, this is it …

Wake up, little wonders. The table’s not going anywhere. Your seat’s still warm and waiting.

Wake up. Every day.