The Golden Substack

Changes, Caveats, and Christians

All my life, I have tried to keep the various parts of my existence in separate places. Work, motherhood, writing, community, I wanted them all to be walled off from one another. When I was younger, I didn’t even like when friends from different areas of my life met one another. I remember being at a football game in college and seeing that happen and feeling acute unease. I had to restrain myself from running down the bleachers and separating them.

I’m a deeply private woman who speaks and writes about very personal experiences. Part of the way I preserve my emotional balance is to have areas of my life that are tucked away, just for me and a small circle of my closest friends and family. Which, fundamentally, works for me.

When I was in college, I read The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing. It was published in 1962 and wasn’t in fashion when I read it in the 80s, but it had a big impact on me because the narrator has that same insistence on separating parts of her life. (There’s a workmanlike summary of the book here.)

The narrator has multiple notebooks, all different colors, in which she writes about aspects of her life. Each separate volume is about something different. The Golden Notebook is the goal, a place in which she will write everything, a bringing together of her thoughts, observations, and dreams, with stories about various seasons in her life. That unified, integrated, Golden Notebook seemed brave, subversive, and slightly terrifying to me.

I started this substack to be about work. Not because work is my preferred topic, but because my job as an executive coach means I think quite a bit about work, and it’s relatively easy for me to come up with 900 words a week about work. 900 words a week, week in and week out, since July 2022 has built 138 posts, which is over 125,000 words, like a book and a half.

And that’s not counting the Bad Boss Brief, which I do with Eugene S. Robinson which is close to 50 episodes and also about work.

I write about other things, like grief and getting older. Those topics are more interesting to me, they are my other notebooks. The personal essays get more engagement, are harder to write and tough to do every week.

The notebook you never see is the one where I write about spirituality. I write for a couple of publications about spirituality, but I never talk about it here. And since my upcoming book The Saint and the Drunk – A Guide to Making the Big Decisions in Your Life is built on spiritual tools I’m going to have to open that notebook.

And I really don’t want to.

The Caveats

It’s not that my spirituality is private, since I regularly publish about it. It’s the problem of The Caveats. Everyone I know who is a Christian talks about the Caveats, all the qualifiers we need to clarify that our spiritual practice is based on the actual teachings of Christ rather than the abomination that the Trump/Vance/Evangelical Christian/Conservative Catholic crowd wants to push on everyone else. Their theology, like the picture of blonde Jesus, bears very little resemblance to the teachings of Jesus in the bible.

But then I feel like I sound like a trite hashtag, #NotAllChristians.

I’m not that interested in writing about work anymore. And, as I start the marketing for the book, I might not keep publishing every week. It was good to take a break over the holidays and just rest. And I wanted to tell you about my plans for this publication, because I have a sense of connection with those of you who subscribe. I think of you as the originals, the stalwarts, whether you pay or not, and you’ve had a positive influence on me. I appreciate each of you.

The name Consigliera Papers is hard to pronounce and spell. Like my last name. But I like it. A Consigliera knows stuff, and can offer sage advice. I know stuff. I like to teach. I think my perspective on spirituality is as informed and informative as my perspective on organizations and work dynamics or grief or aging. And Papers makes me think of my desk, which, at this moment, is a riot of papers. Spreadsheets, contracts, a poem I wrote, notes for podcasts and drawings my granddaughter Ruby did. On the wall across from my desk is a piece of her work, a large abstract with blocks of blue. The wall around the large window is studded with religious imagery, Sacred Hearts, Our Lady of Guadalupe, enameled crosses, St Teresa of Avila.

My office is full of books. The pictures on my bookshelf are old, and pride of place goes to a snapshot of me in my early twenties. I’m writing, by hand, before word processors were something I could afford, working on a novel. I look like a teenager, my long hair pulled back in a ponytail, sitting at the antique drafting table I still use. My son, RJ, is on my lap. He’s about six months old, I’m holding him firmly with my left hand while I write with my right. I don’t know the picture is being taken, but RJ is looking at the camera, his left hand a blur because he is moving it around. For his first year of life, I couldn’t put him down without intense protest, so I did everything holding him, including writing fiction. RJ died, years ago. There’s a little gold handprint on the shelf too, Ruby’s, when she was two. My daughter’s cap from her nursing school graduation, with an anatomically correct heart image on top so I could spot her from the top of the huge UW auditorium where she graduated. On my desk I have small animal figurines that my husband brings back when he goes to Albuquerque, and a ball of blue and green clay that Ruby rolled together accidentally that looks like the earth.

It's all a mess, a map of love and joy and pain and work and loss. And I don’t want to just strain out the bits that feel safe, or marketable, or easy anymore into a thin broth. In cleaning out some papers over the holidays, I realized that in the last ten years I’ve written a novel (unpublished), the book that comes out in May, two versions of a one woman show which I performed in front of what seemed like a sea of people. I’ve written dozens of poems (always unpublished) and the aforementioned articles about spirituality. I like doing different things, risky things. So, I’ll try a new approach here this year, more of a stew than a broth, and see how it goes. Let me know what you think.