🧣 Let sleeping trees lie
What might going dormant allow for more of?
Thank fuck we finally have some snow around here. REAL snow, and it just keeps falling, thickly. I have been craving this, longing for months. This is perhaps my most Canadian sensibility to ever rear its woolly, toqued head. But simply, it is true. I have felt my chest longing for it, the way longings feel in my body — rooted behind my heart, dragging my chest forward with some insistent force beyond words. But longing, as a word approximating the sensation, will have to do.
Something in me really has changed in my relationship to trees in the winter. I see their starkness as some kind of primal wisdom, that to thrive is to be fully invested in a cycle of expansion and contraction. Of taking the care to create, to leaf out and bask in the sun, and then letting all that drop and tending to what is at our core, is held deep and close and unseen. The trees on my street, in these parks around me, are older than my parents, some older than their parents and their parents’ parents. They know to slow, in the dreamy haze of a fresh thick snow, the blank expanse stretching out in every direction, coating the barbeques and mailboxes and eaves like a plush cake fondant. They know to slumber is part of what it means to be alive.
This is the season of resolutions, and I am feeling light. Unburdened by needing to have anything defined. I have no word of the year, no overarching ambitions. A few times, I have braindumped some ideas onto a scrap of paper, into a Notion page, but I have already forgotten what I wrote and I can’t see myself looking back at them anytime soon.
I did my annual tarot reading for myself and so many old friends returned to me, cards I have been journeying with in my annual reads in, some cases, for years. I cackled as I drew them out, welcoming them back to my doorstep. I don’t want to decipher what they mean, only wait patiently and serve them tea until they are ready to whisper other secrets to me.
This is maybe the first year in a long while where I don’t view the changing of a single digit at the top of the calendar as an invitation to become a new kind of person. To become a better person. I already am the person I am, the person I’m becoming. I don’t even have to like her, although the more I practice not having to like her, the more I just naturally do. I don’t have to try to become something else because, like it or not, I’ll just keep unfolding. My work is simply to get out of the way.
That isn’t to say I don’t have things I’d like to get around to, but it feels more like noticing that the percolating things do not need active tending. They actually need to be buried by the snow for a while. They need a little timeout, a little deep freeze. They actually need to just be, instead of being scrutinized, analyzed, and put into words, viscous little beasts that words are. Maybe the difference is, these things now feel decoupled from my worth as a person. From the endless project of self-improvement that is so corrosive and so normalized.
A big part of getting to this place has been, I believe, giving myself the latitude to make less income. Oooooh, that has been, continues to be, a challenging road for me. We have inherited a mythology on career growth and earning potential that is up, up, up, inexhaustibly up — every quarter should be higher than the one before it, every year snowballing like some numeric Katamari that we have to keep the momentum up on, without fail. If you stumble, get laid off, become unwell, are grieving, go quiet, better make it as brief as possible, make it inhumanly possible. Our rent and our mortgages and our grocery bills are rising, and so even standing still is pretty much as good as playing dead.
Last year, the final total on my income was about what it was when I started my career 15 years ago. For our household, this is okay. We are well set up for it and are very privileged to have that be our reality at this moment. I’m not going to LARP as if I’m someone who doesn’t have enough. Yet even admitting that, that I chose to make less money, feels like an expression of decadence, that part of me is ashamed to have “leaned out” without anything “concrete” to show for it.
I believe now that I have always been afraid. Afraid that if I let myself have a fallow period, that I would never get my momentum back. That I needed to treat my career like some relentless game of hot potato, especially as someone self-employed. That if I wasn’t saying yes to every incoming project, the work would dry up completely. That if I was saying no, there better be a damn good reason, preferably with an expiry date. That if I slowed, there’d be nothing left for me to do.
In some ways, 2023 was one of the hardest of my life. I have been breaking the spell on my lack of self-trust. I let all the leaves fall. I cancelled projects and didn’t “put myself out there.” I wept on the floor, wondering what the fuck was wrong with me. I journaled a lot, but not as much as I thought I should. I questioned, just what I have been clearing all this goddamn fucking space for, and why do I continue to need more of it? When will it be enough?
I sat in the snow and I shivered. And, eventually, I began to wonder again.
It is an enormous privilege to take this space. It is an enormous privilege to prioritize repairing my relationship with my own voice instead of continuing to use my gifts, without question, in service of others. I wish that more people had the freedom to take a chance on themselves like this, to let their momentum die down. I wish we didn’t equate momentum with progress. I wish we weren’t living in a culture fuelled by fear and corrosive mythologies.
This is a new moon in Capricorn, and my invitation to myself has been, what needs more tending? What seed am I planting, into the dark? And today, my bones reply, the seed has already been planted. You just connect into it and water it with your longing, your discomfort, your devotion, by noticing when words can’t do justice to the sensations of your body. When they are a pale and paltry imitation of what it feels like to inhabit this world.
It is stark and simple and clear, actually, like the trunk of a tree that might survive for generations. Let sensation balloon inside you, not artificially, but simply as it draws up from the wellspring below. Maybe tell other people about it, what it’s like, using words that can only ever approximate the thing poorly. Do not staple it to some trellis in the middle of January. The snow is falling, quietly now. There is nowhere else to be.
Noticings
❄️ If this resonated with you, Katherine May’s Wintering is a beautiful, lyric meditation on the season and process of wintering and I recommend it with my whole damn heart. Rare to pinpoint a book that has changed my life, but this one continues to unspool new meanings for me.
💫 I am still offering tarot readings for your year, and will continue to offer them for infinity — these are such special, generative conversations that offer so much rich support for understanding the context of change you’re working within. 60 mins. with me on Zoom, recorded, with follow up reflection prompts to take you deeper. If now is not the right time, no worries, you can always find me at amandacaswell.com/tarot.
🦐 Loved this recent post reflecting on, what happens when we stop thinking of expansive growth as the key imperative? To what end? How do we know when we’ve arrived? This is IT, the question I might spiral with for a lifetime.
🫂 Somatics in a nutshell, from Ron Padgett:
