In the fourth quarter of 2019, the fourth Sermon has again progressed very little. A few more stanzas are written, some stunted bits are removed, but there’s a strong sense I’m falling behind my own expectations.

I think this is largely because of my duties as a dad. To write poetry I need long-ish stretches of uninterrupted free time and that is hard to come by with small children around. I can write prose or emails or even code with a baby on my arm, but not poetry. And we’re expecting our third baby in May, so the situation isn’t going to get easier until at least 2022. I also continue to spend much of my mental capacity at my day job as an IT manager, which is both cognitively demanding and so much fun that I want to do it for another couple of decades.

So there’s little point in waiting until I somehow get much more spare mental energy for poetry writing. Instead, I continue to look for ways to achieve more with less. There are other poets with children (though not very many) so it has to be possible, at least a bit more frequently than I have managed recently.

The aforementioned documentary movie came out but the Sermons did not make the cut.

I did at least finish the big blog post on atheist mysticism and got some valuable feedback. This let me elaborate, and subject to criticism, the basic idea of the project, much more clearly than in its poetic format. A couple of minds I respect didn’t have too much trouble with the idea, which is very good to know.