A plan to get out of the woods - #164

It's time.

An audio version with a purring cat, if you’re into that sort of thing.

One of the biggest risks in being a writer in a cabin in the woods is forgoing all your connections with the corporate world to focus on your connections with the corporeal world. No one is paying you to touch grass unless you are cutting it. They are certainly not paying you to feel the echoes of the underworld on a hollow trail rarely trod as you lightfoot your way through a forest more ancient and alive than you could ever hope to be.

But I spent enough years throwing fists of “is this it?!” into the dry air of HVAC systems to know that I was either going to spend my life being a well-paid husk only to find my corn withered and wilting, or, or!

I was going to trade financial stability for air. For joy. For my life.

It’s a strange trade, given that financial stability is in many ways a key component to those things, or to at least reliably delivering them every two weeks minus all the money that goes to someone else. But strange trades are often a plot point in the types of novels I read (and write) and so I thought, “well, let’s try it.”

At first, this was quite a sound trade. I moved to this valley of few with a remote job at a kind company doing good work under the purview of a bad company doing evil work. But that app merged into another… company? Product? Platform? Hard to say what it merged into, but it merged into something I did not want to do.

So I took a job with another kind company doing good work until they got folded into a bigger company doing questionable work. It was starting to seem like doing good, kind work was… not going to work.

Then, miraculously, I got swooped up by some of the most successful people on the planet to work on one of the kindest projects of my career. But it was just that: a project. I was being paid out of pocket, and then, because they needed to focus on other things, I wasn’t. That was when I was four months pregnant. Which didn’t matter, because it was a project. Also, I was under NDA. So I couldn’t tell anyone what I had been doing for two years, which meant when I went to the job market, it looked like I had been doing approximately nothing except scampering through enchanted forests. And I couldn’t say otherwise aside from the entirely unassuring, “I promise it was cool.”

NDAs are, after all, secrets. And whenever the plot includes a secret, you can assume that secret will be problematic later on. That is the very nature of secrets.

So I scrambled. I went from one client to no clients to being a new parent with four clients. Being freelance with one big client is very different from being freelance with whatever clients you can find. There is an illusion of safety with the former and a certainty of change with the latter. I am once again going through a change.

When a storm comes into this high valley, it makes itself known first by the color: the skies darken to the west, a heft of slate colored clouds fill the notch of the canyon. Then, the winds come. The sound rattles the valley, stripping the trees of birds and bark. Finally, the ice hails down as the sky unleashes pellets at everyone and everything. I have hunkered in glades, sheltered in abandoned cabins, and ran the field gathering cats and dogs in every state of storm. I am good at weathering the weather.

And yet.

And yet.

I am looking and feeling weathered for it.

I am a very good writer, creative director, project manager, team leader, and motivator. I am (despite what this diatribe may indicate) a very good worker. I love to work. I love to dig in and make something astounding of a mess. I just don’t want to tether myself to a desk for nine hours a day for the next thirty years to do it. Since 2019, I have been working through the steps to not do that. And I have been successful at staying afloat, but I have not been successful at (where should I take this metaphor to imply financial independence and a secure future…) making it to land?

Of course this Substack is one of those avenues, but it has yet to have the stroke of luck required to turn it into an actual salary.

Occasionally, I will see Notes on how to growth hack your Substack. But growth hacking requires something to hack, and it’s quite clear I prefer to let my hedges do whatever they want. There’s no trimming in the wilderness. If there was, my publishing calendar would look like Business Insider bought Outside Magazine:

• 5 signs you’re ready for mountain life, and 1 sign you’re not

• Why quitting meditation for “tree touching” saved my life

• The 3 things my partner and I say every day to keep our marriage wildfire hot

• What we get wrong about slow living

• What we get right about small town living

• How to go from a bitter gossip to a babbling brook in four easy steps

• You shepherd your sheep, but are you remembering to shepherd yourself?

I mean god fucking kill me. Drag me into the meadow and let the moles live in my lungs because if you see me write that, it’s because I can’t afford health insurance anymore.

Recently, I took a call with a dear friend of mine who works as a creative caretaker. If you’re like what… is that, it’s exactly what it sounds like. She takes care of people’s creativity. And if you’re caught in the italics thinking that’s not a job, then I have to ask: What if I said she was a creative director? A financial advisor? A mental health coach? Because she is, in fact, all three.

Directors, advisors, coaches — these all contrast with caretaker in that they are financially viable. But why? Why is guidance paired with warmth less lucrative? Caretakers aren’t paid livable wages unless someone is so wealthy as to have a caretaker for their estate, and even then, what makes the wage livable is the free housing in return for property vigilance. (Don’t forget to trim the hedges!)

This particular caretaker took my creativity in her hands, just for a catch up, and with all her tender wisdom, turned into Tom Hardy.

She nudged me ever so gently into a deep well of what was I doing taking one-off copy gigs when I had built literal departments. She reminded me that my desperation didn’t mean I should take scraps from whoever offered, but that I should look to my fields to see what else could grow.

But this is an easy place to find yourself, not necessarily in an alpine valley with a wind problem, but just doing what you know because to do something else requires putting all those things you do know in some kind of temporal jeopardy, with dishes, clothes, and debts piling up and no way to know if those piles will be worth it. If those piles won’t pull at your bones when life has already pulled you to your knees.

Sometimes we find ourselves needing the scraps to even walk the field.

I can’t believe I’m going to say it, I can’t believe I managed to drag myself into this big gaping meadow, but sometimes you find that you’re shepherding your sheep without doing any shepherding of yourself.

Well, here we are.

How does a person shepherd themself, though?

This isn’t the same as putting your oxygen mask on first. Nor is it taking time for “self-care” because we are done lofting basic hygiene to the realms of a sabbatical. Shepherding yourself is not a break; it’s making sure you don’t get lost in the woods of bullshit. Which, based on how stationary and directionless I find myself, seems to be where I am.

Shepherding yourself requires looking for clues. There are sunsets and sunrises. There is flowing water and there are thinning trees. There are markers that feel good and right, and there are shadows that feel deep and long. Shepherding requires noting these things. It requires attention. And it requires so, so much walking.

Walking down the road. Walking up the hill. Walking around the house. Walking in the morning. Walking out at night. Walking through the halls of who you are to figure out who you might be. You can’t redecorate without a good look around at what’s working and what isn’t.

Shepherding takes time. It takes time set aside and time planned. It takes time to do the work and time to even figure out what the work is. It might take witchcraft and spells. It might take Excel sheets and receipts. It might take The Artist’s Way for the third or fourth or fifth time.

But most of all shepherding takes will—the very thing the system shepherds out of you. Without the will, the woods will subsume you. Your ankles will sink into the rot of decomposing leaves and you will find your tendons rigid, calcified by submission, unable to climb, unable to run.

So if you feel the creep, the lacing of your achilles or the nails along your spine, if you feel the setting of sun when you are not yet done, then follow the waters to the valley below so you may find a way to shepherd yourself on.

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It took some gentle shepherding of myself to ask this, but: Over 8,000 people get Shangrilogs in their inbox every Sunday. Every week, I give away my favorite parts of who I am for free. In this economy?! you might be asking. And whew, I agree.

A lot of newsletters you do not pay for fill your inbox week-on-week with emails you can’t read, and I have made a very conscious decision to *not do that* because I genuinely hate it, but Substack says that method works. In an effort to continue not doing that, I am doing this instead.

If you’ve enjoyed the hundreds of thousands of words I’ve poured into this project, then consider upgrading. You’ll get the Wednesday edition with the behind-the-scenes of mountain life, as well as access to the archive of Chosen Places. Plus, you’ll be supporting the arts, and maybe one day, even some childcare. Just take a peek below at what the people think:

“Thoughtful writing from a beautiful place. Reading Shangrilogs makes me feel like I'm hanging out at a friend's house on the internet. And that's a really hard feeling to find online these days.” -

Cait Flanders

, author of The Lighthouse

“I love the way Kelton lives life so intentionally. I love (and admire) how she has strong opinions while also making people feel welcome. And I just love her writing. So many sentences stop me in my tracks. Getting more of that writing and more glimpses into Kelton’s beautiful, intentional life is 100% worth the price of entry.” -

Katie Hawkins-Gaar

, author of My Sweet Dumb Brain

“I love Shangrilogs because Kelton and her family are living a very different kind of life from mine, but she magically brings me into her home so that I feel like I am right there watching the snow melt in spring, can smell the pine trees in summer, bask in the autumn sunshine, and then hunker down while a blizzard rages around her log cabin.

It's a kind of magic that I relish.” -

Michael Jensen

, co-author of Brent and Michael are Going Places

“Where do I start?! The first is, because you’re a great fucking writer and I can’t help but read you. So there’s that.

I found your writing through a mutual friend of ours,

Nic Antoinette

, and so it has been this beautiful present to find you, because you intentionally live a somewhat inconvenient life, and that’s where I was headed, and it was scary but it looked like you were having fun. You live differently than most, and there’s something exquisite about seeing the world through your eyes and words; it’s settling and it normalizes what enough is. In your last newsletter you talked about the jenky little set up for your morning coffee and as someone who quite recently equated making it with custom cabinetry and second homes, and who no longer does, I think it’s that there is a shared camaraderie, if that makes sense.

I think you really show what it’s like to arrive now, rather than later, and as someone else said, you give me a sense of place.” -

Holly Whitaker

, author of Recovering

Alright, you get it. Support a small writer while she finds her way to the valley.