Non Fictional Tales #5

It's beeeeen a whileeeeee - eight months of backroom story.

Hi!

It’s been a while. 8 months. Long time.

Some of you may even have forgotten you were subscribed to this substack. If you feel like this is a sign for you to unsubscribe, I certainly won’t hold that against you. I have been gone for much longer than I think I ever expected to be from this. So if you’re out, good day, and I wish you happy reading in other corners of the internet.

And if you’re going to stick around and find out what comes next - well… here’s where things are at.

The last time I published one of my stories was in late October 2024 - a piece in the Rundellfall series where Klem and Iatr escaped capture by the gale knight, Daleannah, after she’d been attacked by the Sidhe Katzu - while Sheriff Ratcliff’s nose for trouble led him closer to the violent encounter happening below the streets.

I’d love to tell you that I finished that story, and now you’re going to get the whole thing uninterrupted. Alas - I have not been writing much story since October. Really much of any. Why is that? Well… the usual for my life I suppose. Romantic folly, social drama, conflicting work goals, side quests, main quests, and a side dish of disillusionment with what it even means to be a writer trying to tell a story through substack.

Is a writer really a writer if they have no audience? I suppose the common answer is “yes of course they are, they’re writing and telling a story, who cares if no one is listening?” Well. I guess I do. Or did. The reality of any enterprise - be it sales, invention, entrepreneurship and even authorship is that you need clients. And a client for a writer, particularly for substack, are subscribers. And more specifically, paying subscribers.

Now I’m reluctant to demand payment for the stories I’ve written. Some part of me is sufficiently ego-driven that I believe my work should be good enough to deserve payment that I shouldn’t have dto demand it, and also I don’t like asking for help. I pushed against that, and asked anyways. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not.

No one in life is obligated to help you, love you or buy anything from you.

Such is life.

But I got caught up in chasing subscribers, spending all of the month of September and a good chunk of October playing the “social media game” in order to build up my audience. It actually worked remarkably well - increasing my reach by about 33% in one month. But I didn’t *enjoy* it. Social media is an uncomfortable necessity - and some people seem really great at it - and I am… well at best mediocre. It’s time consuming. Inconsistent. And it’s not actually storytelling. It’s marketing, and that’s fine - but it doesn’t really do much for me in terms of filling my dopamine deficient brain with a reason to get out of bed. The more attention I paid to it, the more annoyed with life I became.

And, unfortunately, I had other reasons to be annoyed with my life. Mostly conflict with a few former friends. So an adventure into my own people pleasing tendencies, and what to do in the face of unreasonable criticism, blame-making, and lack of interest in finding positive mutual outcomes or negotiating peace. It’s a heck of a thing when you belong to a larger community of people that you have mutual friends and events you’re both interested in, and someone is invested in maintaining a conflict regardless of how much damage it’s doing to all parties involved. I tried to warn them - but my warnings fell on deaf ears.

So my frustration boiled over, and I found myself with little to no energy to write. Just lost the will to keep going. Social media and drama are an unfortunate mix and exhausting. So I went in a different direction and spent much of my time in the event planning and coaching side of my life instead - as these had a bit more direct income generation for me, and are important aspects of my life’s purpose in a different manner.

I wound up hosting a series of “woo woo” healing ceremonies with a good friend of mine, Kris Elaschuk, called the ‘Eight paths to wholeness’ ceremony. They were pretty fun, and I got to flex my understanding of somatic healing work. The first few events were around four hours long each, and the journey included a cacao ceremony, group massage, yoga, ecstatic dance, yoga nidra, sound healing and group singing / kirtan at the end.

“That’s a lot” was a pretty common phrase we heard describing it. It was a fun project… actually *incredibly fun* because the arc of experiences was meant to hit on many different levels of somatic practices - including chemical/nutritional (cacao), touch (massage), movement (yoga & ecstatic dance), relaxation (yoga nidra), and passive and active sound (sound healing & kirtan).

All of our attendees raved about the experience, saying it was one of the best and most relaxing events they’ve attended.

These ceremonies were a significant part of my life for the next few months. There were troubles with them, as any event like this runs into a lot of competition around where I live - and that pesky reality of ‘marketing’ reared its head again. But the events themselves were fantastic and will be a thing I re-visit in the fall of this year.

I wound up taking on the role of Master of Ceremonies for Intention 2024 (not actually, but it’s the closest name fit for people not familiar with the event), which was a huge departure from my usual approach to that event of being either the lighting director or event director. I’m much more comfortable in a project management-y kind of position, or doing the easy work of installing event site lighting that I’ve been doing with my brother for the last 15 years. But it was time for something different.

I took from this experience that I am a *goofy* ceremony leader. There were enough weird hiccups that led to a *lot* of improvising at the last minute. In a way that was deeply frustrating, but I handled it to the best of my ability. I had approached the role with a great deal of ambition, but unfortunately my ignorance of what the role typically involves did show. The end result was that some people loved what I did, and others thought I was a jerk.

Sigh. Pretty normal experience for me these days.

The effigy burn, inspired by the burning man event, and a regular part of Intention year over year, was… tiny by previous years standards. Of course the effigy burn two years ago was so massive that the camp owners banned us from doing it again for a year - so maybe what I presented was more appropriate.

There were a lot of things that went really well - including the opportunity to highlight the diversity of spiritual beliefs of members of our community during meals through an open grace format, a modified eight paths healing ceremony for the night of the 1^st, and a general feeling from many attendees that ceremony and opening/closing circles were handled really well. I did my best to create a space for people to feel included with their own spiritual practices…

Turns out this really annoys atheists.

/shrug.
Oh well.
Can’t please everyone.

And of course, the backdrop to all this was a new, exciting, and intoxicating romantic entanglement with an absolutely lovely lady that ended almost as quickly as it began. She was a fair bit younger than me, so it turned out exactly the way a number of my friends predicted it would.

Abruptly and painfully.

She was lovely, fun, and inspiring - I don’t regret the relationship at all. Though, I do wish things had panned out differently.

I did, however, learn some really powerful lessons on attachment theory and the anxious-avoidant cycle - how that ties in with a number of my own childhood wounds - and how I kept replicating those patterns in my relationships.

I love personal growth. Yaaaaaaay.

Sometimes the short relationships have the most powerful lessons for us.

Do you know how hard it is to write creative prose with a broken heart? I imagine some of you do. I find my writing during those times skews hard towards the genre some call “Sad Boy Literature” and “Heart break poetry.” And neither of those genres are ones that I feel particularly inspired to publish on. I’ve developed quite the collection of navel-gazing writings that I may or may not wrap into a book about mental health one day, but I figure that day is still far in the future, for when I can actually claim to have “good mental health” and found the way through all the odd trials and tribulations I bring upon myself.

But this brought a really interesting challenge to me.

My relationship to challenge itself.

The capacity and ability to be able to work and focus through times of suffering. I had been clearly failing in this department, as one of my primary purposes in my life (my path as a writer) was falling flat because I was being too distracted by women and social conflict. My desire to be liked and loved, running directly into the unfortunate reality of clear rejections of both, proved to be too much for my ability to sit down and “just get the f’n work done.” And the lack of validation that the work was worth doing (the absence of consistent praise or profit) just became too much for me - and I burnt out. And once burnt out, the mountain of excuses to not engage with the practice kept building until… well…

I went tree planting.

Which was, itself, a wild decision. I’m not a young man anymore, and I’m heading directly into the beast of an industry that is REALLY tailored towards taking advantage of young people’s willingness to do extreme things to their body for profit. This is not a career path that is easy on the body by any stretch of the imagination.

Now I’m pretty fit for a guy in his forties. I’ve been doing martial arts for a long time, been a gym rat for over 20 years, and have half a sports nutrition degree - so I had just enough faith in my physical capacity to risk it doing something that a number of people think is ‘incredibly stupid.’

But honestly, if I only did smart things, I would be a wealthier and more boring person.

I got pretty lucky, and managed to land a contract with a quality company based entirely off my network. Turns out I knew some of the management from years of partying in the Edmonton scene, and I signed onto the company to do a modified role of quality checker and tree planter. So I won’t have to fully destroy myself before the end of summer.

Just mostly.

My familiarity with ‘living on the road’ for work, and working at music festivals has helped. My love of somatic work and refining physical motion to get a perfect sword cut or dance move has also helped, and my first couple days of tree planting resulted in me planting pretty quality trees (if being kinda slow about it.)

This will also give me a really great opportunity to test all that I’ve learned about bio-hacking recovery in my body, to see if I can heal faster than I do damage to myself. Here’s hoping!

Otherwise I may be limping home early before the season ends.

One of our early projects was setting up a permanent survival plot, to measure the effectiveness of previous year’s tree planting in a specific location in the Mistahae area of Northern Alberta - a reforestation project that’s been going on for several years now, after the catastrophic wildfire that burnt down a large portion of this region, along with a big chunk of the town of Slave Lake.

That’s probably one of the coolest things about this job - helping with reforesting devastated regions in the aftermath of climate catastrophes.

But… WHY am I doing this? Well - for one you can actually make pretty great money doing tree planting / forestry work. I met a guy who, after 10 years of being in the field, is capable of planting 7000 trees in one day. Since it’s piece work, and you get paid by the tree, that’s between $1500 to $2000 CAD for one (admittedly long) day’s work. Can he do that every day? No, but many, yes.

Though not in Mistahae. The land here is in rough shape.

And I have no illusions that I’m going to plant that much. My first day was on a golf course (deceptively terrible land to plant trees in), and I only planted 600 trees. I’ve never worked so hard to earn slightly more than minimum wage in one day. If I can get to 2000 trees per day before the end of the season without crippling myself, I’ll consider this to have been a wild success.

Oh right - the why.

I’m only sort of doing this for the money. I *am* earning really good money right now, certainly more than I have in a few years now - but the why is much more complex.

Challenge in work is something which I realize I have a mixed relationship with. For most of my career, even in my early twenties, I had the luxury of picking work I found interesting - and I never had to stay at a job I hated. And being an occassionally clever man with a knack for doing good paperwork, I tended to wind up in office or sales jobs. But if I got bored or miserable, I could just leave. I was never at risk of ‘not having enough food on the table.’

I was, in hindsight, kind of spoiled.

I am also, however, tenacious and stubborn.

It’s a weird mix.

One of the podcasters I listen to, Connor Beaton from “Man Talks,” repeatedly brings up his own experiences doing tree planting in his twenties as being a foundational experience of helping him transform his relationship with challenging circumstances and staying resolute. He’s since gone on to become a really successful coach and public speaker, and feels that experience was really important for his own evolution of becoming ‘a man.’

There have been several successful business men I’ve spoken with over the years that have talked about their experiences with hard blue collar labour in their youth as being a really critical part of their development as a man, and someone who could face adversity with resolution and dignity.

Weirdly, this is something I never did. In part - because I didn’t have to.

So I picked something that would be ludicrously challenging. And my goal is to make it to the other side alive, with the project complete and in the rear view mirror. To stay focused on my dharma within the mission I have chosen, and do it with the most dignity I can muster.

And part of it is is connected to the start of my own journey as a storyteller. Because this latest shot at story telling, starting in 2022, began in the forest. Not *these* forests, but in the forests of Jasper, AB - walking around Cardinal Lake, listening to the trees, the wind and the rain - trying to piece together the direction of a story I’d been percolating on for close to ten years.

Those forests were also ravaged by wildfires in 2024, nearly destroying another Alberta town in their consuming greed.

It’s becoming a bit of a theme up here.

So the connection of “The Forest” to my storytelling is pretty undeniable, particularly with the backdrop of the Godswood, a mythical location of importance to the world(s) I’m building - though we’re still skirting the edges of that place. But that place will come more into focus in time. And just as my story leading to Mistahae began in the destruction of a forest, so too did the story of Rundellfall, with the logging and burning of Giúisscáth.

So when my former love suggested to me that we should go tree planting this summer, something stuck in my psyche that wouldn’t quite dislodge itself. And even though she has moved on, the idea stayed. So here I am - and where I’ll be spending most of my time until October.

I can’t make any promises on how often I’ll be writing story and publishing it. But this place has been on my mind, and I will be returning here as the capacity and inspiration to write returns to me. I have heard the whispers of the trees and ideas have been percolating. It’s also less likely I’ll get up to trouble out here in the remote north. So. Hopefully that keeps me focused.

We’ll see. I’m pretty good at magnetizing trouble. There are a lot of bears here.

Until the next (hopefully shorter) time,

Robin George

A note to my paying subscribers