Placemaking in the Flood

Oct 28, 2025

Why haven't I posted anything in a month?

Life, mainly. As an academic, the flow/rush/chaos of the semester tends to overrun a little of everything. I've also had a tough few weeks, with some bad news and some personal loss. And really, I'd already been feeling stuck in the doldrums for a fair bit of time.

So while I've been reading plenty and thinking plenty and even baking plenty, it gets hard to find the time to channel that work into other formats. To log the bread made, to write about the poem I found moving, or to connect one book I just finished to another I wrote about earlier.

Or where time appears, the energy doesn't.

And it's not just the site. Even my private, personal journaling and scratchpads have been sporadic and a real mess lately.

It's unfortunate that these practices - notetaking, journaling, microblogging, etc. - are often the first victims of busyness, or of exhaustion, or of the deep blues and the mean reds. Unfortunate because, at least in my experience, writing about one is reading and doing is a critical way to keep one's head above the flood, whether you are doing it in private or in public.

There are obvious practical benefits. Writing as documentation helps keep things straight, gives you an anchor to refer to, a way to ward off confusion. It serves as a record that you can consult later. Writing as thinking, or perhaps writing as observation and reflection, helps you do more with what it is you are already doing, bringing you to engage more deeply with whatever it is you are writing about. These sorts of practices, no matter their form, are a bit of temporal magic, helping bridge past and future.

But there's the emotional benefit, too. I find this harder to express but even when the writing isn't profound, writing serves as something of a placemarker.

Or perhaps even a place-maker. A bringing shape to the present. A consecration.

Whatever else is going on in our lives or in the world, whatever is overwhelming us, it reminds us of the good that comes from continuing, as much as we can, to take pleasure and learning from certain practices we find important and enriching -- even if that practice is the journaling itself.

It reminds us, too, that we did take pleasure and learning, even in the midst of the overwhelming. It plants a seed: let's do this again, as soon as possible.

I said it was unfortunate that these practices are often the first to get lost amidst the deluge -- but it's certainly understandable. There is a little rebellion in making space for these practices, and rebellion - even the quieter, more personal types - rarely comes cheap or easy.

Here's the good news: even if I've set it aside for a minute, it never takes much to get started again. A notepad or a blank screen. One minute or sixty. A few words or a dozen pages. And I can do whatever I want with it: file it away never to be seen again; place it in my system of notes; set fire to it and hope its message reaches its destination.

So here's my note for today. My place-making, my consecration.

(Or perhaps: My light, my destroyer, my meteorite.)