The Dream

I’ve been skipping over my essay writing lately, but there is so much else going on that I haven’t had the time. Man, I have been busy. I started hand-binding “Vignettes of California” and putting some chapters out on substack and that led to the creation of Imum Press through which I’m going to publish all twelve of my books, which is a weight I’ve been carrying since I began writing that I’m finally pushing off myself. God, was I tired of carrying it, and literally going crazy. And I don’t know where I’m throwing this weight off to, if it’ll just eradicate in air, or plant itself elsewhere, but I’m on a path, and that in itself feels good. You see I always labored for a living, waitressing, then gardening, landscaping, because no one was sanctioning my writing, no one would give me a platform, give me a break, so I chose to work in the silence of the exile, in nameless, invisible positions. Yet I realize now that even that was an important draw for me, that level of labor and invisibility. I never actually liked joining in like other people, I never joined a printing press or a college magazine, a writer’s group, nothing. I wrote, yes, madly I wrote, but so privately, so deeply alone, and my other hours were for laboring, I preferred to extend that silence, to just work with my hands. But with a pattern like that intact I could not figure out how to break out and start communicating with the world, start creating reciprocity and responses to my writing that had been for so long kept in a vault. Gathering the dust of years and years. And the tighter that lock, the deeper my poverty, my hand-to-mouth life.

Then, this year… despite the fact that no break had come, I gave up my side laboring to focus on writing and figure out how to break open that door. Strangely enough, like the boy in “The Purple Crayon,” I had to draw that door myself to get out. I was at such a loss, writing to agents, trying to appeal to this person and that—and that’s always been hopeless for me—when it suddenly dawned on me: All that laboring I was doing was not for nothing—it is my nature, it is the way. I can bind books—how many authors can do that? I love working with my hands; so why not combine that with my soul work? Why not start laboring for my soul than for just a dollar? Why not create my own press—and in my soul resounded this deep-bottomed yes. I mean, what was I even sacrificing? The dream of a heap-load of money that publishing potentially brings? My own careful editing for someone else’s idea of what makes sense? What killed Raymond Carver? I realized that—where I’m at, making all my family’s meals, gardening for us on our little plot, sweeping clean this one room yurt we live in, is a beautiful life in and of itself, and that I can bind my books, book by book, and create enough buzz through my labor alone and potentially bring in at least comparable wages to what I was making pitching hay and picking tomatoes. And if at the end of the day people are finally reading my work, too, and it’s making its slow way out there, then that’s it, that’s the dream. I don’t need more than that. Not great riches or fame. It’s my hand-made life I want, as Ms Estes said in “The Women who Run with the Wolves.”

So here are the updates—my Sun and Moon features are reaching people througout the world! And that is so incredible and so humbling and super motivating to me. I want to finish them all but it will take time, and much more knowing! I write only about the combinations I’ve known personally, but I hope to know each and every one in time. I finished Libra Sun-Aries Moon and Leo Sun-Pisces Moon this morning, and I’m binding two books after this, stretching into some kundalini yoga (I <3 Dawn Rabey), working a couple hours on a farm in the afternoon, then taking my daughter to dance class.. life is really very full and I am very grateful. Thank you to anyone who reads this and to my guardian spirits, which a wise young woman named Ella told me recently was just.. nature itself.

Love <3 Jessy