Listen:
finding my ears
before looking for words
means a whole lot of not speaking
my mind,
where my thoughts collect without form;
dying unknown, alone
in that umbral
vacuum.

---

I don’t know how some of you do it. Day after day, some writers come back and find something to say, something to share.

I’m jealous.

I often find myself apparently empty, without too much to say. Or somehow, perhaps I have too little I feel is worth sharing with others.

Am I selling myself short?

However, I’m trying to get back in the habit of paying attention to my creative spirit. Not just writing, but working with materials to bring new things into being. It’s that spirit that I believe drives all of sentient life. The other night I managed to break free of the spell of video games to take the time to rack my March meads to secondary. “Racking”, for the uninitiated, is simply the process of siphoning our fermented product out of the primary vessel into a sanitized secondary vessel. It removes the liquid from the fruit and the yeast and other solids used for the primary fermentation and allows the brewer to finish out the fermentation to their specifications.

Batch 09a, my blueberry / green tea was good. Current ABV at about 16.5%, but still fairly high on gravity. Good medium blueberry flavor, pretty sweet yet. Batch 09b, my mango habanero was also good. Current ABV at about 18.5%, also pretty sweet. Just the right amount of heat buzzing right in the middle-to-back end. Great spicy flavor that doesn’t burn!

After racking and testing the gravity and corking and airlocking . . . they were already visibly fermenting again! Sweet, that’s another first for me.

I didn’t manage to do an April mead, though. My goal was a batch a month for the first year but I’m still ahead of the curve. I’ve made well over a dozen batches by now, counting my juice hooching experiments, and taken copious notes, I have ideas for my next batch. My May mead is going to be a three-gallon batch. I’ve decided five gallons seems like a lot of work when it comes to the bottling stage, and one gallon feels like it’s not yielding enough. I’m looking to fill a dozen bottles in a single batch, that’ll make me feel good.

Hopefully, light is shining on your faces and you’re enjoying mild weather and good times. Happy Mothers’ Day to all the mothers out there, and especially to the ones in my life. We’re all here creating our way through the world, one craft, one pet project . . . one baby at a time.