For the last few weeks, I’ve felt scattered. Not rushed, not hurried, just a gentle noticing that I am holding many seemingly disparate threads. I say “seemingly” because I can feel them drawing together, magnetized by some barely perceptible gravity as they draw ever-closer together. I feel the dance in this, the elegance and pleasure in the slow build of tension. Like how a song builds its rhythmic scaffolding before the drop, or the leads fucking HATE each other before, oops, there’s only one bed! in a romance novel. The build is half the fun, the context necessary for satisfaction. So maybe, there is method to my madness.
There is pressure to feel like there is something tangible at the end of this, whatever “this” is, some output that means it was all worth it. Some outward way of showing, “see, I have been at work behind the scenes! It was all part of the grand design!” Here, I’ll admit it — there is no plan. There is only more careful noticing of what the world is teaching me, where it hurts and where it feels delicious, and what that might be pointing me towards.
To honour that noticing, I’ll just offer these threads up to you. Take of them what you will, perhaps they will get braided into your process too, a bird’s nest in the making, or left to flutter on the wind.
As I sat in Or’s masterful seasonal intuition card workshop on the equinox, and they prompted us to reflect on signals of spring, all I could think of was BIRDSONG. My experience of birdsong is an experience distinct from that of “birds,” since the song is mostly disconnected from my experience of seeing them. It’s always a joy when I do catch a glimpse — the cardinals’ bright flare against the stark grey skies, the blue jays trying in vain to wrestle the thick peanuts from the slots of our bird feeder.
Birdsong becomes like traffic, like white noise, the hum of the background, except for these first few weeks of spring. These first few weeks, it’s piercing, victorious. “We fucking made it!” they cry for themselves, for me, for you, “we fucking made it through winter!”
I consider how joyous it must feel to make such a sound, to feel something rise up inside and answer it with a bleat from your beak. To feel so good being warmed by the sun, feathers ruffled by a gentle breeze, reunited with your friends in the place you might call home. To screech a song of being alive. God, birdsong really sounds like the joy of being alive, doesn’t it? I can’t unhear it, can’t deny the part in me that responds in kind, harsh and exciting.1
Did I mention here, I have been learning how to drive? I have been learning how to drive! A project more that 20 years in the making. It is astonishing, honestly — the more I learn, the more I can’t believe people do this every day. That they do it so much that it becomes second nature, considered as simple and intuitive as walking or riding a bike. There are so many THINGS you need to manage in your mind, to build and rebuild a working model of the road around you over and over again. People say it will become easier, but for now I am marvelling at this skill, this muscle memory that so many take for granted.
My lessons have been going well, I meet up every week or so with an extremely chill dad in his forties named Sid. I drive around, he tells me where to turn and mostly looks at his phone while we make small talk. I find that comforting, somehow — he thinks I’m a good enough driver that he feels relaxed enough to text with his wife, to plan his day, whatever he’s doing in there. I ask him who has the hardest time learning how to drive, and he says that young men struggle to slow down, that they take to it more naturally but want to speed beyond their skill. I don’t know what to make of that anecdote except that there feels a truth there, somewhere.
I am shocked at the strange mix of tired and energized I feel after driving practice, just winding around the neighbourhoods of my city for an hour. I understand that, as a learner, I am still actively processing the cognitive load of driving, but shit, it’s a lot. It’s a lot! I notice I clench my jaw, clench my hands and breathe a little breath into those spots — they are learning to loosen, that to keep me braced won’t help us stay safe. (This is a lesson for more areas of my life than just the driving ones, but such an obvious edge makes for good practicing.)
Now, the highway now is practically a revelation, everyone is holding such a wide view of the environment and what everyone else is doing at such a high velocity. To revise that working model so seamlessly, so fluidly. Bless my partner, he talks through the choices he’s making so I get a feel for how the process flow breaks down. My mindfulness practices are paying off here, in being able to pick up and set down working assumptions without making meaning out of them (although there is a fair amount of meaning making as I try to remember the precise orders of operations I’ll be tested on).
Speaking of mindfulness, I’ve decided to take an MBSR course starting next month. I have been looking to create more accountability around my meditation practice, and have been flirting with a couple modalities to see what clicks. It’s one of the things I miss most about my coaching training, actually, being in contemplation together as a group, and reflecting on our experiences. It’s part of the magic that makes Journal Circle what it is, and is part of the reason why I want to learn how to better support others.2 Looking forward to getting to know my innards a little better over the next couple months.
I’ve taken on some corporate work again and wow, I’m so struck by how dysregulating the whole design of it is. Stop-gap staffing, too tight timelines, diffused accountability, the whole shebang. Maybe I have just been in the small business space for long enough — where generally the decision makers are involved at every step, where the urgency is intentional and meaningful about moving things forwards instead of simply checking boxes — that this madcap cycle of sprints feels foreign to be in the flow of again. Luckily I have sharp colleagues and a limited remit, my role narrow and well-defined, and I’m keeping it that way — it’s my forever self-leadership project to not step in and try to solve stuff beyond my purview.
One thing that feels like a noticeable change, one I’ve been tracking for a while now: in agency world (and maybe corporate world more generally?), it’s pretty normal to find camaraderie in complaining. Complaining about the client, about leadership, about the project, about decisions made. Maybe it’s a natural offshoot of feeling like you don’t have power in the situation? But it does strike me as unhelpful since in my experience, it generally tends to make the work HARDER — I feel a lot more resistance towards the job to be done if I’m not empathizing with the person or the mindset behind the question they’ve invited me into.
When I first started noticing this a couple years ago, I began changing my mode of relating to my colleagues (which includes clients too, we’re all in this together) that has fundamentally shifted my mindset as a partner — what might I know that they don’t? What might they know that I don’t? How do we meet in the middle?
It’s been a relief to shift out of the business of answers, but to provide offers, invitations to see it a different way. To provide a perspective that might be helpful for their business or their life or whatever they’re grappling with. Maybe the tension inherent in any question worth its salt doesn’t have to be a source for vilification. Maybe it’s easier if we admit nobody has it figured out, and that’s what makes it a question worth asking in the first place.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention I recently went on my annual vacation, to an all-inclusive in Mexico with a couple friends and my partner. God, what a thrill, to be near the ocean. I had a dream a few months ago, one I haven’t been able to shake, of the tarot card Emperor, sitting on his throne in the knee-high waters as the sun sets behind him. He seemed booming and imposing, but as I waded into the waters towards him, he shrank in size, no longer larger than life and threatening, but human-sized, approachable, tired. The dream felt like it was about seeing beyond the artifice of an idea, how much less intimidating The Thing can be from closer in. How much more realistic. How humble it might be.
So it felt like the sea has been waiting with secrets for me. If I might gather them into any words, after a week of soft sand and blazing sunshine, they might be this: pay attention. What’s truly happening is in the things that haven’t been said. Take it all in and be here, truly here, not lost to memory or fantasy or skating over the waves to fulfill an expectation. Simply be here and awake and true to what’s real for you, right now.
Something that hadn’t felt clear before, that now feels abundantly obvious, is how vacation in the Western world is often practiced as dissociation. We think of it as escape. We think we’re supposed to feel a certain way because we booked the trip, and now that it’s arrived, it doesn’t feel quite like we thought it would feel. We drink all day, a low-lying but steady buzz, numbing us out to our inhibitions and nagging doubts. I couldn’t help but notice how alcohol is used in these spaces, and how early into travel that it starts for many people — on the plane, on the bus, on the way to the resort. One guy tried to order four beers on the 20 minute bus ride to our hotel. Just a merging of alcohol and relaxation as one, as singular, as a matched set. Maybe alcohol is the only way for some people to take the edge off the discomfort of transition, shifting from the busyness of daily life into the languid pace of lounge chairs.
It’s gotten me curious about taking the edge off in general, about what I’m numbing myself to during moments of revelry and rest and connection. There are as many different answers to that as there are human beings, I guess. I’ve been taking a break from alcohol as I consider what it might mean.
This note is coming to you from the thick of a full moon in Libra, from the first eclipse of eclipse season (this one, lunar). Eclipses generally aren’t energy that you want to be intention setting with — they are wily and weird amplifiers. They do everything pedal to the metal, with unexpected, tangential results. Add to the fact that we’re heading into a Mercury retrograde starting next week, so everything we’re currently experiencing will be under review over the next few weeks. Great! 🙃
Libra is a sign interested in the collective, interested in justice and how all things are relational. I am deeply relational, although I resist it, my thinking and ideas part of a mesh of conversations and relationships and books read and ideas shared. I love that I have this rebellious side who says FUCK IT to the way others think about things but yes, this too is deeply relational, working in opposition to assumptions.
Some of what has gotten me stuck is the pressure to be original, to come and offer you something new. But of course, one must only need to call and the universe answers, this time in the form of Alice Sparkly Kat’s latest zine on working with your sun sign, just released today:
Don’t worry so much about making all of your thinking original. Originality of thought can create too much pressure when most of us are interdependent thinkers. – Alice Sparkly Kat, How to Work with Your Sun
If the intention behind this project is to name what needs releasing, it is the myth of reconciling all of these disparate pieces into some grander design. My inclination is to weave them into a larger whole, but I wonder if that scale often gets too ambitious to manage. We are talking about life, here, about making and meaning making, here. About work and learning how to drive and hearing the birds sing. I wrote most of this by hand, because my thinking comes out different that way — moves out at the pace of my body and not the frantic fluttering of my mind.
It is simple, really — my work is to notice, and to tell you about that noticing. My work is to say, gosh it’s like this for me, is it like that for you too? How might it be different, do you think? What could be better?
Yes, this is a Mary Oliver reference. This poem has been everywhere, just everywhere lately. Yes, March is for Wild Geese.
