At 9 am I sent an email to the techies and designer with whom I’ve been working, saying I thought we were ready to go live with the new website, www.cumulativeimpacts.org
I don’t normally do websites, but this one has been my baby from the beginning. When did I start working on it? I was sketching out ideas for it in August, thinking in September about the kind of specialized search system it would need, muddling through with the rest of the staff the whole chaotic, sprawling notion of “cumulative impacts” that we were trying to get under some kind of conceptual control. Tried things that didn’t work, found more people to help, entered data, more data, and more and more. Tested and re-tested, tweaked, posted.
So it’s been about 9 months from conception to completion, appropriately. And it’s not a static site but will continue to grow. You could say it is a baby ready to breathe in the world and grow. I haven’t really had any baby dreams but if I had I would know what they were about.
I am alone. There is no one with whom I can even clink mugs. It is too early to call anybody.
This is left-brained work. As a practical mystic, I know that I need a balance of left- and right-brained projects. But the left-brained stuff exhausts me. Yesterday late afternoon I found my head just hanging low. I went for a bike ride but it was difficult, my knees protested, my butt was tender, no extra energy available from my spirit. Everything felt like work.
Recreation yesterday was finishing the laundry from the weekend, the last of the sheets and towels used by eight houseguests. I can’t do it all in a day because I air-dry stuff on three drying racks. The weather has improved recently and I can get two batches done in a day. It’s a satisfying production line. The towels dry rough. The sheets catch all the dead tree blossoms and sometimes a bit of bird poop but everything also picks up the Essence of Outside. My linen closets reek of the woods.
I got an email from someone at The Mennonite asking who had taken a certain photo I sent so I guess they are publishing the article I wrote on the Congo Cloth Connection in preparation for the big Congo Cloth Market we are holding at the Mennonite Church USA convention in July, in Pittsburgh. Check that one off.
More emails about the Congolese guests who are coming several weeks before the convention. I agreed to pick them up in Chicago in mid-June and, several weeks later, take them with us to Pittsburgh. Meanwhile they will be passed around to other hosts in Michiana. (I smile at that term but it’s descriptive. There really is an entity, a territory, a culture that bridges northern Indiana and southern Michigan.)
Vic doesn’t know about all of this yet. Our French will get a much-needed workout. Nina calls those of us working on the project the Fellowship of the Cloth.
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