I Locked My Phone in a Closet

on attention, not knowing the end, and spending time wondering

I have been eating up books like nobody’s business. In the past week, I have read Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey, a Stephen King book on writing, and two Dorothy Allison books (to even out the ableist men and because she is wonderful). I attribute this to some epiphanies I have recently had, though I am always wary of epiphanies, especially at the “beginning” of the year. But this has been a good epiphany so far, a helpful one. 

The short of it is I have been leaving my phone in the closet and turning my laptop wifi off. I’m still figuring it out. It worked much better last week when I was on break from school. Of course, I need my phone to communicate with teachers at school, I need wifi to send Substacks out, the list goes on (unfortunately… and I eye the walkie-talkies that sit unused at school). But here is where it gets fun, an almost ode to my days at the Oregon Extension and to Mary Oliver, who often spoke on wonder and the importance of living in it, rather than having an answer right away. Her poems are incredibly attentive, due to her wondering, I’m sure. Her words are needed, I think, in a world where you can have a thought and, just as soon as it is there, look up the answer, find it instantly, move on. I am wary of epiphanies but I am also wary of this world.

Throughout the week I have been carrying a leather-bound notebook that Shanley made for me four years ago, before she left for Romania. In it I write down questions that I want to look up over the weekend or, hopefully, think about throughout the week. I can ask anyone around me, or look a word up in the dictionary, but I cannot google search it or reddit it or Youtube it from Monday to Friday. Eliminating all of this has made me wonder a few things in itself, which I have had slow answers to so far. For example, recipes. I cannot just look up a recipe. I either have to make something up from the ingredients in the kitchen or I have to print a recipe at the library or use a cookbook.

There are other things that I am working out, but there is a cycle I have paid attention to. These are my days: I wake up without looking at the phone (the mystery of time is a fascinating primal feeling), I write at least 1,000 words, I head outside to do animal chores and whatever other tasks need attention, I eat, I drive to school to be with the children until school is out (counting money, reading books, walking like ducks to the library). By the time I am home, it is around 4 pm and I have spent the whole day with very little contact with my phone. By that point, I attend to whatever is flashing danger zone Needs Attention on the cellular, but I am not attached to it. It’s just another piece of furniture and I set it back in the room, if I can, and chop the wood or make dinner or drink pear cider from the orchard. It’s not terrible in any way. 

I guess I urge you to try the same, but it is a curious and working urge—I know it is not possible in the same capacity for everyone. But if you can, in your own way, do it. It is like waking up to this possibility of the world around you. I wrote this the first day, “I plugged my phone into the farthest wall and now it is the next morning. I haven’t touched it. I’ve reached for it twice. I’ve thought about it many more times. What is there to do? There are toys in the house: matches, guitars, sewing machines, needles, pans, looms. I have this urge to take a saw to wood and make building blocks for myself. I am a child again.” 

It is just a working urge. May it inspire you however need be. For me, I want to write more, use my time better. That was my inspiration. It started there and stemmed to thinking about the chickens in the yard, somehow. Since January, I have been collecting data on their lives. What time I let them out and put them in, what the temperature was that day, the highs and lows, how many eggs they laid. I was paying so much attention to them, and it was so enjoyable, that I wondered what else I could pay attention to. Honestly, I hear the owl just the same, the frogs croak at the same volume. But I stop to listen for just a little longer. That’s the thing, there is more time. 

I have been writing about it. Tracking, researching, wondering about phones and islands and a slower life, whatnot. I am practicing writing longer-length things and while I want to share it, it also feels so good to work on a project[s] that is not ready for the world yet. I want to keep that, savor it, spend more time with it. It is lovely to be here once(ish) a week, yet I also need the experience of slowing down and working/fermenting/hiding my words. They are mine for now, and it has been enthralling to say the least.

Anyway, I am still here. It is so fun for me, an exercise in itself, to write for an hour or two once a week and send it off. The harder job is deciding what to put here and what to save for later. Like my phone and chicken research, I am waiting to see what it means. I don’t know, I just collect the data. And like Stephen King’s thoughts on writing fiction, it is most fun when you don’t know the end. Riveting to not know. Devastating, too. And when the time comes we are, of course, our first readers… as that horror book novelist says.