When a person asks me what I am doing, now that I have left paid work behind, I'll usually say something straightforward. Like, "I'm doing more gardening," or "I'm reading more books," or "I'm spending more time in nature."
But underneath it all, I think I am really trying to change my relationship with time. To feel it is at last enough. To live in the present moment more often. To slowly reconfigure my inner constellations so that they once again make sense to me.
I feel a sense of trying to emerge, as if from a long sleep or captivity.
If my work life prompted a long hibernation of the soul — because my job never called for soul, just "deliverables" — then how do I reawaken this wellspring of vitality, passion and intuition? Is she still there?
I see her, my spirit, in my mind's eye. In a clearing, deep in an oak wood, owl on her shoulder and crown of leaves upon her head. She stirs the cauldron. She feeds the fire, she keeps the moon in a drawer. She is wise beyond reckoning.
I call to her: Be with me, be around me, be within me!
It is difficult to hold space for the unmaking necessary before the rebirth. Difficult to feel like enough without doing. I spent many hours in the garden when the sun was high, planting, tending, watering.
But the winter, I tell myself, is the time to stop struggling toward the sunlight. Let my inauthentic life die. Stop doing to justify my being. Let go of. Listen for whispers. Descend into the darkness of that cauldron, and be stirred.
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