let the light in: spring equinox 2021

Does all beginning require chaos? And does all chaos have beginning in it? When we see chaos all around or within us, are we seeing incoherence or incomprehensibility? When I say “the unified self” I mean the self cohered and coherent to itself. Is the self ever comprehensible, fully, to the self? Unlikely. But to say that the self, the driver of this bone and meat machine, is unknowable or not worth seeking to cohere into knowability, is to turn away from the divine in us – and to let the chaos win. To remain in a state of only possibility and swirling not-yetness. This is the great stall and cursed trump card of perfectionism: to make us think, it will never be perfect and therefore never done, so why begin at all? How about a little distraction and despair as a reward for all this circuitous striving?

An answer: Embrace the chaos but do not fall in love with it. Refuse to accept it as an end state by naming it seed, necessary burn, phase to which we return and return as we molt and grow and emerge and emerge and emerge.

An answer: Fall in love with the chaos but only for a moment. Give her everything you’ve got for a night or a week or a year. Surrender to the storm until you’re soaked to the core, saturated to the groundwater level so you can slake your own thirst for years to come. Then step out into the sun.

It’s the spring equinox and the light is out and gracing everything. Even the shadows exist because of and in gratitude to the light. The world and ourselves don’t have to be comprehensible to cohere, to come together in a kind of unified multiplicity. I don’t have to know what the bird’s song means to be made whole by it, any more than I have to understand how to turn and plane a board to adore the woodwork of these windows, any more than I have to know who you are, your full name and first desires, to be grateful and elated you exist.

The part of the tree torn away by the storm will only become apparent when the leaves fill in. It is too large to grow back in my lifetime. I will never stop mourning what I’ve lost, but I will make a home for it among the new blooming. We will never be what we were again, and that is a fact we can use to salt the earth or our food, use for ruin or nutrient.

Every time I have been remade I’ve chosen to come back softer. It may be different for you. Still, I recommend this: to remain tender to the world’s and your becoming. To let the light in.

Photo by Natalie Grainger on Unsplash

dispatches from the wild interior: September 17

5 of Cups: Less than a week out from the fall equinox, we can feel the season starting to turn. In the same way we become an age over time and not on a specific day, the year ages into itself. As we inch toward balance, toward equal amounts of light and dark in this thing we call a day, we’re invited to consider where we’ve been directing our gaze. Are you so engrossed in the spilled wine that the water in the standing cups is starting to glaze over with dust? Or is it the suffering you’ve kept your back to and is it time to turn your face, finally, to the grief? And once it’s all faced and felt, here’s another invitation: to look up. To feel the sorrow and the rejoicing race up your body like water drawn up a tree from root to trunk to leaf and look – where are the birds headed? Where are you?

we're always revising toward the unknown

This is the thought sustaining me right now: we are always revising toward the unknown.

Until two weeks ago, we thought we knew basically where we were headed. We masterfully planned weddings, fundraising campaigns, international trips, book launches…

But we didn’t know what was coming, and furthermore we didn’t know that we didn’t know what was coming. Or we didn’t recognize it, we thought sure, it might rain on my wedding day or a recession might happen or there might be a terrorist situation in that other country or my publisher might have to push back the book’s launch – but we didn’t think this would happen. That something would happen that would change all of it.

But this was always a possibility. And once we are through this, whatever “through” looks like, there will be (and there are now) uncountable other dire and brilliant possibilities for our next.

We have to revise toward the unknown. And it’s hard, it’s the hardest thing. We want to know. It’s why we love scientists, and psychics, and really anyone willing to use the right words and tone to reach the soothable part of our psyche that just wants someone else to be in charge, to fix it, to tell us what is happening, what is coming, and what to do about it.

In January (which feels like it was approximately seven years ago), I made a fundraising plan for a really important new political/cultural/literary space in Chicago. It involved donations from people who can give a little and people who can give a lot, it involved lots of gatherings large and small, and it all has to change. The plan from six weeks ago was a plan for a different world.

This had me completely paralyzed for the past few days. How on earth could I plan with no idea into and for what world I’m planning? Where to even begin?

Today I remembered that it’s almost the spring equinox, that precipitous moment when we pivot our focus from the interior realm to the exterior; from the dark, contemplative season to the possibility of rebirth, growth, blossoming.

So I looked around me. I saw the new buds on the trees along my street, and I knew they held the promise of growth but not its guarantee. I saw the crocus pushing up through the mud, and knew it could bloom or be crushed or nipped by a late frost.

I saw my life and my work and the choice before me. I could not make the world more certain, I could only choose how I moved into and with its uncertainty.

So I begin by acknowledging that things have changed, by mourning the loss of the illusion of normalcy and predictability. I begin by acknowledging that those changes are uncomfortable, are making things difficult and even dangerous for many, are not changes I would have chosen.

I begin by acknowledging what remains. By seeing abundance. By letting the fear and worry rise up and then letting them go, knowing they will return.

And then I plan, not with certainty but with uncertainty. Not against the unknown, but with it. These things are the things we can do right now. This is our best guess about where the world will be in two months, and what we will do if the world is something like that. And so on. And so on. And on.

~~~~ A ritual practice for this equinox ~~~~

I believe in preparing for worst-case scenarios, or at least almost-worst. I have shelf-stable food and a water purifier and am keeping the car’s gas tank full for once.

But the spring equinox also offers us a chance to consider what is possible in the best ways – what is possible if we allow for uncertainty, if we choose to move with the tide, float and let it carry us back to shore.

For this practice — for which free worksheets are available here — first language or draw the endings to these sentences:
* I know it is true that:
* What I don’t know is:
* But I trust that:
* And my great hope is:

And then take that great hope and from it draw out a best- or good-case scenario:
* IF:
* then maybe:
* and then:
* and then:
* and then:

It’s a holiday of abundance, so repeat and repeat and repeat. When you feel finished, lay all these lovely scenarios out before you. Close your eyes and feel the possibility they radiate. Let that radiant hope fill your body, toes to fingertips to crown. Bask in it, like the spring sun sure to come.

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