It's been a while.

Simple thoughts on joie de vie

It’s been a while since I was here. I am hoping that the arrival of a Wuzzles and Snippets in your inbox finds you with a cup of tea and bird song outside your window. I hope that life is perhaps a little less worrisome and that the appalling state of the world hasn’t completely smacked the stuffing out of your joie de vie.

Understandable if it has, no question. In the past couple of months I have come close to throwing in the proverbial happy towel myself but have acknowledged that my doing so will help nothing, change nothing, achieve nothing. I am of the mind that to squander the freedoms and privileges afforded to me through pure happenstance and huge good luck would be untenable.

One of the most cherished gifts I have is my own joie de vie. It gets me through a lot of shit. It’s a life line and a benefit that I am unwilling to abandon no matter the state of the world. To do so would be to unleash my own hounds of hell into my heart and my head. I would fall apart in a blink of an eye and be of no use to myself, much less anyone else.

The tricky part is to embrace the scope of my own strengths without guilt when confronted with the suffering and extreme duress that many parts of the world are facing on a daily basis. Closer to home there are friends struggling with either chronic illness or mental illness, or a general malaise of being through no fault of their own. Even closer is my own roller coaster ride of emotions, worries, and perceived failures. I am at a loss for an answer to the why of it all. I am not even convinced that the answers would be helpful.

What is the constant replay for me though, is the resilience and tenacity of both nature and humans. When things get broken, busted, discarded, rejected, they somehow regroup, rebound, regenerate, and resume. Hopefully with a tad of added wisdom if a human is involved. Nature seems to have that sorted.

I have had my own ups and downs the past little bit. Maybe they will show up here as a Snippet one day, maybe as a Wuzzle. Right now they are too fresh, too close, too present for me to do them any kind of justice with my faint grasp of prose. Except for this small dilemma…

When I started writing here, I was fired up six ways to Sunday with a burning anger and sense of frustration about the censorship of opinion that I caved to on our farm’s Facebook page. That anger brewed like an overused tea bag, getting more acidic and bitter by the day. I finally unleashed it here, rather than on the long suffering ears of my obliging friends and found a love for writing that had been packed away in one of the messy corners of my mind. Wuzzling (me mumbling my opinions to anyone who will listen) gave way to a multitude of snippiting (little stories of my collected experiences) and then I hit a great big old stone wall of self doubt. Ran right into it. Stunned and stupid I couldn’t see my way forward. I started getting knotted about my lack of formal writing education, I worried about the genre (what the hell is that anyway when it’s at home?) How my words might be sitting with people, if there even were people. How much judgement? What about content? Too much Wuzzle? Not enough Snippet? What would appeal to readers? Were they reading? Too short, too long?

You can see where this is all going. Absolute paralysis. Blank pages. No muse. My brilliant friend and teacher, Jill Margo, reminded me to write what I wanted to write. To write to myself first.

So I am. Wuzzles and Snippets, I have concluded, is going to be allowed a bit of wiggle room for growth, rather like the waist band on my trousers. Me and my writing may wander, following our own curiosity and will inevitably change (liberation baby, liberation!) I do hope you will come with me. And it’s okay if you don’t. For me, it’s simply a matter of joie de vie.

‘Til the next time, kristine

If you wish a treat in your in-box, check out The Outside In: A Writer’s Herbarium by Jill Margo. You can find it on substack!