Graceful Nonlinear Taxes Can Wait a Year or Two

Experiments in Graceful Non-Linear Living #4

I was excited to move into a new phase of work. With no externally imposed deadlines at the moment, I was looking forward to pulling up my next 2 big projects, and finding ways to explore graceful nonlinear work with them.

Then I figured you know what, while I’m between project-sets, I should just take the opportunity to knock taxes out of the way real quick.

…This became a whole thing.

If Anarchists Were Better-Organized, They’d Recruit During Tax Season

I won’t bore you with the details, but both my girlfriend and I had very odd work situations last year, and figuring out how to file taxes for them has been a surreal exercise in assessing which box fits least-terribly or feels less-audit-y. The US tax system seems to be designed to torture self-employed people and expats, and we are both—so if there is a way to do taxes in a graceful and nonlinear fashion, fueled by curiosity and exploration: I did not find it this year.

I’m not hopeful about next year either.

But I’m open to ideas.

Okay, but What’s On Deck?

I’m (fingers crossed) almost done with the tax stuff, so I am looking ahead to what’s next, and how I might approach it.

The exciting thing is, my next projects are very much moving into a new phase of my work.

Last June, I realized that if I wanted to talk about the imaginal in more depth, I was first going to have to backtrack to the somatic.

grace in the wilderless @the_wilderless

It’s weird, cuz I did most of my hardcore somatic stuff before I was on twitter, so there was no need to *communicate* it, just to *do* it, And now, it’s getting clearer and clearer how much I need to be able to communicate somatic stuff IN ORDER TO communicate imaginal stuff,

So I ran some workshops, played around with language, oriented my personal practice back towards a stronger focus on somatic meditation, pulled together my Somatic Resonance course, and ran more workshops based on the Somatic Resonance material. All of that was to create the foundation needed to explore imaginal practice.

And now… I’m kinda done. I did it. I’ll continue adding to the course, running small cohorts for it, and answering questions for practitioners, but… the heavy lifting is behind me now. It only took (checks dates) 8 months.

Huh. Felt longer. There’s been an oddly timeless quality to the past year for me, ever since I started spending more time communicating what I see in the somatic-imaginal.

Onward,

So now, 8 months later, I can get back to what I was doing before: communicating about the imaginal and mythopoetic aspects of experience.

That’s what my next two projects are about. I’ll have more to say about them once I dive in further, but the summaries for the moment are

1. A mini-book about the core “moves” of imaginal practice, how to build up the skills to freestyle the mythopoetic on your own. It’s going to be rough-hewn and aimed at people who already have experience with things like IFS, Existential Kink, and basic meditation. Folks who know the area, but are looking for pointers at what zone of it I’m talking about.

2. A course on Mythosomatic Dreamwork: a way of working with dreams that puts aside “interpretation” and instead focuses on returning to the dream and navigating it on its own terms; on allowing the inner ecology of soma, psyche, emotions, and eros to work on itself, to unfold into a fuller expression of your embodied reality.

It feels good to be moving in this direction, feeling my way back towards imaginal expression. I have a lot of ideas on how to work with these projects together, but I’m probably going to save those for next week, when I’ll hopefully be checking in about how they went.

In the meantime, I’m just going to finish my damn taxes and get myself set up with some brainstorming sessions for each project.

Here’s hoping for a smooth re-entry into Graceful Nonlinear Living after a brief stint in Taxland.