I’ve recently found that the cramped space of a single line or paragraph is starting to paralyze me. I’d like to, if only for a moment, express everything I am feeling and thinking. The whole end-times-fear-and-joy-and-speed of it all. Do you feel that too?

It almost makes me want to give up words and take up painting, or music. And then I remember that painters and composers have the same raw deal: there comes a point where you must surrender and begin, maybe just with one note, one brushstroke, and you build your piece from there. If you listen quietly, if you stay with it, if you eventually get out of the way, you can give a shape to something that didn’t have a shape before and let the world have it.

I struggle with most of these aspects of making art: I like to listen to my unformed writing by offering ‘helpful tips’ and asking premature questions about its meaning, I like to stay with it for twenty seconds and then watch six hours of ‘The Pitt’, and I don’t like to get out of the way. I like being in the way of my books and poems, for years, like a craggy boulder in a Zen garden.

And yet, within the struggle, there’s a field I sometimes reach. I call it the still field. On the still field, I find the words. It turns out they have been waiting there for a long time, patiently. And it turns out the only thing needed for me to receive them is being who I already am. Experiencing the still field has very little to do with ‘doing’ anything, but of course I forget that every time.

I simultaneously give parts of myself to this field, and I am fed by it, often in mysterious ways. And I am quite sure that people who are less controlling than I reach this place far more often. Nonetheless, the still field is for everyone: all the neurotic bunnies (I see you!), the intense types, the wild ones and the shy ones. Your art waits for you there, ready to be gathered up and carried over into this world, right into the glitching present.

There’s a New Moon in Pisces today, one of the first untroubled lunations in Pisces we’ve had in a while. It is followed, just two days later, by the Spring Equinox. It’s a bit like a dusted lens being cleaned, this combo. And you might, for the first time in weeks, have a much easier time arriving at the still field. It helps, too, that Mercury will station direct on Friday and thus perhaps cause a little less travel chaos, brain fog, misunderstandings and mixed-up files than it did in the last three weeks. None of this, of course, means that things will be normal again, or even easy. It’s just not that kind of time right now.

‘I have decided to detach from all the terrible news’, people tell me. Others describe the utter exhaustion of trying to ‘stay engaged’. To be honest, I don’t think either option works. And I believe this New Moon invites us to leave this worn-out binary of detachment/engagement behind. Not by denying the suffering that exists in the world and inside us, but by being with it in new, unfamiliar ways. It makes me think of a passage from the book ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ by the Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer:

“Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”

Let the world hold you, then. Surrender, just a little. Let yourself be fed by its wonder, even though none of your questions have yet been answered. Risk delight. Remember that you are brave.

Sources

‘Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Penguin Books, 2020.