#38 Hibernate
Pause and rest.
Instructions
Notice how nature resets into winter.
Invite rest as a necessary part of creation, and even non-creation.
Take care of yourselves and each other.
Making Space (and Time) to Pause
Hello, friends. At the end of a truly nutso year (and two years of extra change and grief), it’s worth remembering that the cycles of the seasons exist for a reason, and are a good template to follow for our own lives. Corita Kent explains it well:
And though physical space might be unavailable, internal space exists, and the cultivation of enough energy to be creative—though it’s not easy! Larson DiFiori, scholar of Daoist philosophy and Visiting Assistant Professor in Religious Studies and Contemplative Studies at Brown University, says
“If we make ourselves too useful, then we get used up. … (The texts say that) there are these trees that grow in nature really straight and have nice wood, and look nice — those are the trees that will get cut down and made into wood products, because it looks nice. But then you see this ugly, gnarled tree that no one wants to go near because there’s gonna be knots in the wood, and you can’t make nice boards out of it — that’s the tree that’s gonna survive. … What are we losing when we’re trying to be so productive, and what is it that we gain when we take that moment and say — okay, I’m gonna be useless.”
Touché.
The Challenge of Stopping
For me, one of the hardest parts of pausing is the fear of the backlog of things avoided in the pursuit of productivity. Pema Chödrön writes:
Anxiety, heartbreak, and tenderness mark the in-between state. It’s the kind of place we usually want to avoid … The challenge is to let it soften us rather than make us more rigid and afraid. Becoming intimate with the queasy feeling of being in the middle of nowhere only makes our hearts more tender. When we are brave enough to stay in the middle, compassion arises spontaneously. By not knowing, not hoping to know, and not acting like we know what’s happening, we begin to access our inner strength.
Being brave enough to engage in the “in-between” produces real benefit to ourselves—once we can get over any fear of ourselves.
The Importance of Wintering
The writer Katherine May describes the importance of what she calls “Wintering”:
And on that note, I’ll be taking a hiatus from publishing this newsletter and blog and whatever you want to call this. At the beginning of the year, I was working freelance, Substack was a weird little thing used by nerds, and Instagram was “only” a problematic platform. All of those things have changed dramatically, so a pause is needed.
I look forward to reconnecting with you all in 2022, and I remain committed that viewing our world with curiosity and interest—and making things—are both useful (and even necessary) acts to undertake. I wish you plenty of rest and excitement until then.
And Once More, Music
Somehow Radiohead released an album and I totally missed it! One of the quietest (and saddest!) songs on the album, “Glass Eyes”, feels like getting off a train in the winter and trying to figure out where to go next. It’s a good one.
If you’re in need of something a little more inspirational as we head into this hiatus, you can never go wrong with LCD Soundsystem’s “Dance Yrself Clean.”
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You made it to the end. Thank you.