The Crossroad

I had a post prepared for today, but I just couldn’t bring myself to publish it.

It’s called Surviving to Thriving: Getting Through the Midwinter Blues, and it’s a straight forward article offering nine basic strategies to help the reader get through the final stretch of dark midwinter. An overall decent article that could become popular on a Google search, except I couldn’t shake the feeling that something crucial was missing.

As many of you know, I’ve been out of the mainstream workforce for some time now. In an effort to keep abreast of technology, I’ve recently experimented with some of the AI writing tools available, which I was excited to learn provide a quick and dirty bit of acceptable content based on the chosen topic. Perfectly fine for pumping out fact-based “how to” articles, but far from sufficient for anything with deeper meaning that calls to the complexities of the heart.

I confess much of the content in my last post, Embracing the Light: Garden Planning for Spring, was foundationally supported with AI; but I found I needed to go through extensive rewriting to fill gaps and capture the deeper points of the shared human experience I was looking to convey. My most recent article, the one I can’t bring myself to publish, was even further away from that goal. And so I found myself at a crossroad.

I asked myself, “What is the purpose of this journey I am on? What is the purpose of this project?” The answer: “Improving the shared human experience through Spirit.” Not money or success in conventional terms, but rather simplifying the external and bringing it into balance with the internal. And although technology offers us huge steps forward when it comes to simplifying our external lives, it often comes at a great cost.

The crossroad is behind me now, and so is the AI writing experiment. I look ahead having learned something valuable and precious. We are not replaceable. Spirit is not replaceable. Spirit is Life.

Blessings,