I live a life of duty now,
but I’ve been fierce and free.
The proof is stored behind my brow
as neon memory.

It has been a while since I posted a progress report, and much has happened in the meantime.

It isn’t that I have a lot of time or focus to do writing, really. I’d like to do one or several of these high intensity writing days where I work myself into a writing frenzy and do nothing but compose stanzas for like ten hours straight. (Usually about ten to twenty stanzas come out of that and about half of those survive editing.) I haven’t been able to do one of those for over a year now. But fortunately there is another process that produces stanzas, which I call receiving uploads.

This is basically when stanzas bubble up from my unconscious mind, more or less fully formed. It seems to happen randomly (I haven’t found a pattern) and with slowly increasing frequency. It didn’t happen at all during the writing of the first sermon, a few times during the second and a few more during the third. It would appear that during those long days sitting with my dictionary, my rhyming dictionary, my thesaurus and my notes, looking for ways to squeeze the narrative into the sermon stanza format, my System 1 has been watching and learning, and now it occasionally chips in.

Too occasionally, though. I want to have the fourth sermon (now titled The Project of Humanity) ready for the next Less Wrong Community Weekend, i.e. in late August or early September 2018, and I have a long way to go. So I’m starting to apply some more pressure on myself and get myself to put in more work. If I can’t do a day, Martha is at least old enough now to allow an occasional hour.

In other news, there is now a PDF of the four voices version a PDF of the four voices version of “Children of the Milky Way” up on the downloads page.

To meditate, find solitude.
Then try inhaling awe.
Then try exhaling gratitude.
Then all you’re grateful for.