🪣 Chop wood, carry water
On showing up and letting go
Life has been full lately, full as the moon in the sky. I have started going to a coworking space a couple times a week, which brings me more joy than I expected. Gives me a destination and a sense of purpose. An excuse to get out of the house. A jolt of energy I hadn’t realized I’d missed. It took me a few years to tire of my own company, maybe, a couple years weeded of expectations around my social needs, to let them reseed and begin growing again.
I am finding my use of spaces is shifting. I have started working from my armchair in the living room more often, at night. I would rather read in a public cafe than in bed. I haven’t needed much floor time, lately. At other points of my life, it has felt really good to close the door to my office and have the work live elsewhere, to have clearer distinctions between home life and work life. But now, my life is sloshing all over my work in ways that feel more enticing, more delightful, more juicy and conjoined and interdependent. Maybe I am finally trusting that leaning into the work won’t overrun my life with complete abandon, as it has so many times in the past.
The coworking space is beautiful and new, the surfaces gleaming. I get to encounter parts of myself from earlier in my career — stopping to pick up a premade egg salad sandwich and cut up pineapple from the grocery store, like I did as a junior copywriter. Taking a phonecall in a tiny soundproofed pod, like I did as a senior consultant working on confidential brand launches and feeling very self-important and urgent. Except now, now, these parts are meeting with coaching clients, meeting with friends, meeting with strangers. Talking about our feelings and our bodies and our intentions and what it’s like to be in change. Writing about tarot, writing copy again for clients. Small talk and big talk. It’s a much sweeter mixed bag to be opting into, a trail mix made up of all my favourite components.
On the days I go to the coworking space, I also go to a yoga class, in a new-to-me studio. The studio is bougie, and the people who attend it wear matched sets of Lululemon and thick white socks. I feel what it would be like to be intimidated by them, as parts of me likely are, but mostly I am simply here, without apology. My worn tshirts and off-brand leggings don’t fill me with the same sense of shame they might’ve as a kid, when labels meant so much more, meant acceptance and normalcy and safety. Now I show up simply as this stiff older queerdo, mat front and centre, and do what I came here to do, which is stretch.
I do child’s pose a lot, especially while others are in three-legged dog, when my wrists start barking back. Amazing, how quickly the body becomes stiff. Amazing, how simple movements, done with more careful noticing, can make you quaver and curse. Feeling into these joints, these muscles again for the first time in a long time, is humbling. It feels like good medicine.
I am also taking a class in depth work right now, on working with the shadow through tarot. I haven’t specifically been guided by shadow work over the last couple years, but in hindsight now, I see, how any sort of work towards integration and wholeness is shadow work. It is inviting in those parts of self that can be unsavoury, caustic and rejected.
I have been relaxing myself, all the parts of myself, in part to let them rise up to the surface, the whey bubbling up from the bottom of the tank, and letting them float. Not with the intention of skimming them off, as many practitioners might promise, but simply in letting them be released from the immense pressure they’ve been living under. To be exposed to what air might feel like, as in a float tank in a darkened room. Simply letting them feel into what it might be like at the surface.
Here is a thing I am learning about the relationship between depth and shallows. Sometimes, it is understood as depth when we let ourselves float at a shallower level, to rise above the details and fuzz out our eyes. We might get the Magic Eye picture resolving itself in front of us or we might not. But what happens when we let ourselves dip into and out of many pools, making small talk, picking up or dropping the occasional seashell, letting the water sluice off our bodies from one place into another? Letting life mingle without design and intentional alchemy. Sometimes, depth isn’t very deep at all — it’s learning to be with what is veiled in plain sight, whether you understand it or not.
There is a new practice animating my practice of tarot, but maybe also my practice of life, from psychologist Carl Jung and his contemporary Pierre Janet, called abaissement du niveau mental. The Oxford Reference defines this as “a reduced state of concentration and attention, accompanied by a loosening of inhibitions and relaxation of restraints, in which unexpected contents may emerge from the unconscious.”
For this full moon, I am releasing my focus, no longer needing to articulate the thing to myself ad infinitum to stay in alignment with it. What is the thing anyway? I simply want to be here, in the stream of life. I simply show up here in child’s pose and let the cool air settle around me, breath fluttering in my chest like a bird. I simply show up to the page and trust there’s something of value here, for me, for you. I simply show up to loosen the tension on the binds of “should” and “can’t” and “have to.” I simply show up.
Goodies
Tarot available with me for your year, for your moment, for your always.
New hyper-fixation album: Thandii, A Beat to Make It Better. Sultry, crunchy, smooth, for lovers of Broadcast and FKA Twigs. Rare to come across album I can just let loop and loop and loop, yet I listened to this three times without noticing the other day.
This poem, from Margaret Ray:
