The Meadow Garden: 6 Months Into Being
I’m rolling into the sixth month of the existence of The Meadow Garden (TMG), a community that I started to create space for military-affiliated writers regardless of genre. The fact that The Meadow Garden has been around long enough to warrant a 6 month reflection is astounding in and of itself.
The Beginning
I started TMG in a similar fashion that I start many things: on a whim. I think this fact is powerful, personally. It’s very easy for an enlisted member (especially in junior and mid-tier enlisted ranks, but not excluding others) to feel powerless to enact or create anything. Creating something, or even getting something to change in the military, has nearly always felt like a bureaucratic trudge. Until you realize it doesn’t have to be.
I realized just before the founding of TMG, that I (and by proxy, everyone) had the ability to say something existed, and people just take it face value that it really did exist. My first experiment saying something existed was a project called Defense Intraprenuers Group (DIG). There was a subtext in my creation of this group that isn’t relevant here, but a handful of people joined the group and even participated in short-lived conversation. Some might call it a failure that it didn’t last longer than a few months (much of which were inactive), but I knew I was onto something.
My Relationship With Writing
Writing has been a long passion of mine, and in a very real way, it has informed parts of my being. I think better written than speaking given the same amount of time for both. I feel more myself with the written word than any other way of expression. As many people who feel this way about writing, I tried to make it a full-time thing. I wrote fiction while enlisted and it was an exhilarating time. But all the while I was writing in isolation. I had no one of like experience to share my ups and downs with (and there were a lot of both).
Being a few years removed from my fiction writing experience and newly into a new writing path (which I am still struggling to figure out), I realized I had the capacity to say that a community existed. And it effectively did.
The Rest
TMG was birthed out of conversation with a few close friends. I felt the need for a space for people to write and grow with one another, and I felt an equally compelling need for my involvement in the community to be as unnecessary as possible. This is been the guiding idea of TMG. While I am the founder of the group and often pursue organizational relationships on TMG’s behalf (such as with our partnership with Air Force Gaming), things are otherwise organized through other people acting on the organization’s behalf. I want everyone in the Meadows to feel as if they have the power and authority to lead TMG.
This idea has resulted in biweekly meetups, a medium account with content on the way, a significant growth of slack channels, new friendships, and a few potential projects that are ripe for exploration and execution. All of this is much without my direct involvement.
I am optimistic about this small community; about its ability to inspire others to write, its ability to exist without me, to create wondrous and beautiful things. It could stay exactly the same size/way for rest of its existence and I would be happy and proud of what has happened. Even though I’m not much of a future focused thinker, I look at the next 6 months and know that they’re going to be filled with as much wonder and meaning as these first 6 were.
Note: This article was also published on the authors blog: These Giant Steps.
