Iterations at Play
a garden bunny duo, a Joyful Practice Handbook preview, & a podcast experiment
bunny iterations
I noticed the first bunny a few weeks ago. My desk is set up near a window that looks out over the garden, so I could take my time observing the bunny and learning its routine. At first, it only emerged from its home under the garden shed for tense nibbles, fleeing anytime an unexpected noise or quick movement surprised it. The bunny grew and grew, and soon, it started to look more like a teenager.
Then last week, a second bunny appeared. It looks exactly like the first bunny, except much smaller. Together, they’d emerge from their home to eat dandelion and clover and chase one-another up and down the garden path. Later in the week, I walked into the garden, and there they were, still alert, but less nervous. I moved as quietly and slowly as I could, expecting them to run for cover, but they didn’t. They watched me watch them, and eventually, they grew bored with my impromptu photo session and went back to snacking on dandelion greens.
I admit I’m easily distracted, but yesterday was worse than usual. I could hardly focus on work because there was a BIG CHANGE in the bunny routine. The nervous, quick-to-fright, bunnies were chilling hard. The smaller one found a patch of dirt near the green bean bed and spent much of the afternoon resting. The teenager loitered near a large wooden pallet near the garden shed, eating weeds and laying with its body half hidden by the pallet.
When I sat down at my desk this morning, there they were. Still chilling. Until, oops! The smaller bunny scared itself with the garden hose, jumped about a foot in the air, and ran back to its new resting spot, its beige fur blending in with the dirt. It took a little while, but it found its chill again: its belly and hind legs spread wide across the dirt, its little snout resting on its front paws, and its ears laid flat against its back. It looked asleep, but I could see its nose twitching furiously.
I don’t know what changed for the bunnies ( do they feel safer in each other’s good company? did the heat of the past few days make them susceptible to lollygagging?), but they’ve gone from furtive to relaxed (as relaxed as the nature of a bunny will allow). It might be that the garden, located in the side-yard, surrounded as it is by fence and house and gates, with lots of places to hide, acts like a container, a place where they can spread out a bit and let their bunny selves take up a little more space.
iterations as revision
Jenn has been working on a series of pages for The Joyful Practice Handbook that explore different modalities of writing and how they impact process. When I asked her about using an early version of the handwriting section for this post, she told me, “I have some pages that have many iterations, and then some that are still actively being iterated.” Active iteration is, in fact, what revision is all about, and for the next couple of months, revision is what Jenn and I will be all about.
Looking over early drafts of pages, I’m reminded that one form of iteration we’re playing with is taking up more space. Like the garden bunny duo, our ideas need room to spread out, to lounge around and discover how they want to evolve. Counter-intuitively, taking up more space often looks like a page needs to hold less—less images, less words—so the original ideas can spread out and grow across an entire section.
Here are three iterations of a page Jenn has been working on about writing in a journal as a teenager. I love seeing the evolution of images and words unfold from iteration to iteration to iteration:
Joyful Practice iterations
Jenn and I started the Joyful Practice project with an eight week Zoom series. Then we added free single sessions (on Zoom and in-person) and even held a professional development Joyful Practice workshop. We spent the last weekend of April sharing Joyful Practice with the larger Olympia community during Spring Arts Walk, and when we launched our Kickstarter project and celebrated its official end, we held live videos here on Substack. Joyful Practice keeps evolving, and we are evolving with it.
Our dream is to continue to build community around writing, art-making, and collaboration in ways that are joyful, accessible, and span different formats (analog-digital / in-person - virtual / synchronous-asynchronous). We’ve decided to experiment here on Substack with a podcast mini-series. This series will highlight a handful of emergent Joyful Practice principles and offer prompts for working with them.
This Friday, we’re going to post our first podcast episode, and (surprise, surprise!) its gonna focus on iterations. Jenn has even offered to share a current series of pages-in-progress for us to go over together. It’ll be a live iteration, y’all!
In the coming weeks, we’ll try out other formats for engaging with Joyful Practice. If you have any ideas or requests, please leave a comment in this post or direct message one of us. We’d love to hear from you as we develop this next Joyful Practice iteration.
kickstarter update
Our Kickstarter campaign has officially ended, but we’re taking late pledges, so if you’ve been meaning to back the project but haven’t, you still can. Here’s the link.)
As of this morning, we’re only a few hundred dollars away from our stretch goal, which is so exciting! Jenn and I really wanna work on adding a new section of the book dedicated to Joyful Practice mascots from the natural world (hmmm…the garden bunny duo might make it into the book!)
We have a couple bunnies in our backyard too and they just make my day! At first they were super jumpy but now they seem to be more comfortable and hang out pretty close by. Happy to hear you are enjoying the bunnies too! :) Looking forward to checking out your new podcast!