Dismounting From The Well-Saddled Life

There is nothing more delicious – or heartbreaking – than being rediscovered by The World

I am in the last sixteen hours of a seven-week writing sabbatical. I can feel a squeeze somewhere around my solar plexus, a combination of eagerness to be back in my regular schedule, and a panic that I haven’t done everything, haven’t written or accomplished as much as I’d promised myself I would. 

But, this is the third short writing sabbatical I’ve taken, and I am onto myself at this point. While I take the time to acknowledge what I have accomplished and where I am in whatever project I’m currently working on, I have learned not to hold my self-worth ransom for things that remain undone.

Each of these sabbaticals have begun right around the Winter Solstice and ended right around Imbolc. 

This feels like the right window, given that Winter has always been a deeply creative time for me. But really it’s also the only window. Since I’ve been learning more about small farming (which is to say, glorified gardening), the Spring, Summer and Fall are simply too busy to imagine taking much time to sit at my computer and write. If there are plants growing outside I can barely think once the sun has risen each day. It’s loud with stories out there, and hungry with the endless need for weeding, pruning, tying up, squishing the little yellow striped beetles and shaking the iridescent round beetles. And then there’s harvesting and eating and never could I ever forget simply sitting amongst the squash vines and zinnias and broad beans as they argue about who is in whose territory. I can barely hear myself think, let alone manage to get it out onto paper, while all this is going on outside.

So Winter it is. Taking time away from the activities that outwardly define us is an increasingly crucial practice. And of course, it is also, increasingly, a crazy hard-won luxury. But don’t be misled. I am a person who is well prepared to die broke. Without a penny of savings, and just paying my mortgage and expenses each month, I’m not sitting pretty financially compared to my peers here in Boulder. Each year, right around August, I look at my schedule and panic a little, seeing the seven-week stretch marked off in my calendar, a stretch of time when I will be virtually without income, and I jump into high gear. I’m fortunate (in more ways than I could possibly name, but certainly specifically) that I can offer a course or two and stockpile enough cash to get me through the seven-weeks so that I’m just barely covering February’s first of the month expenses before I’m making a modest income again with clients and regular courses. It’s not particularly graceful. But it works.

I say all this because I want to plug the very good practice that is taking time away from the activities that maintain our societal – or ego – identity. If I can do it perhaps you can too. I want to celebrate the importance of taking time to allow The World to catch up with us and perhaps have its way with us so the possibility of spontaneous course-corrections or at least a gear shift (down or up) might take place. We are so entrained to choose a path and stay the course, complete with a whole lot of morality and value judgements that come along with that sort of consistency (read also, safety and soul-crushing monotony).

I’ve sat with many a client who shudders a bit when I let them know I’ll be taking seven weeks away from clients and teaching, to write. I, of course, am salivating as I describe this to everyone, imagining the quiet, the uninterrupted space to be in more intimate and undisturbed conversation with all the Others. As I describe my time in a kind of spoken-word erotica, often clients will shudder simply from the terror of stopping, as if the world will gallop on without them if they dare dismount to walk alongside their well-saddled life, even for a relative moment or two. As if they will forget their own name or perhaps, even scarier, everyone else will forget it. As if to ask, if I don’t teach my 7:30am yoga class every Monday, Wednesday and Friday won’t I cease to exist?!

photo by Eberhard Grossgasteiger

I rely heavily on my Norse heritage for my own sense of identity and one of the pillars of that identity is being useful and productive. Almost relentlessly so. But somehow I escaped this terror that seems to grip my culture, this one of self-identity and being so easily forgotten by the world. The key likely lies in the answer to the question upon whose doorstep do we lay our identity? Or, to which world have we given the power to define us? I have laid my identity at the doorstep of The World, not my society. (‘The World’ as defined by me in previous essays is: the larger, wilder, more intelligent world; the one we come from; the one to which we owe everything; the one to which our bodies will return, though that implies that we ever left, which we did not; where the Ancestors and all that is unseen but very much still present and participating lives; Dreams and the Dream-maker; The Mystery; The Anima Mundi. This is an animist World, where everything is an everyone, with souls and unfolding stories of their own, all playing out in an intricate inextricable, magnificent, generative drama - Life.)

I look to The World for a reflection of my value and worth. If I looked to my society, or the small world as I call it, I’d likely be an insomniac with a bulging Instagram and a steroidal Tik Tok and I’d still be falling far short. It’s brutal out there among the influencers and wanna-be gurus. The World, as I experience it, is a much gentler task master. The World cares only if I ensure that at the end of each day I’m fairly wrung-out of all that my soul might have to offer, being emptied out while simultaneously – magically – filling up, over and over. This yard stick never includes how much money I made or how many new friends on Facebook I acquired. But it always includes how much I’ve offered myself to the others and things I care most deeply about, to whom I’m betrothed. It could look like writing a poem, seeing four clients and planting the corn starts. There is always the quiet nudging voice that asks me, yes, but have you cried as much as you’ve laughed today?

In these weeks of sabbatical time there is a kind of reunion with myself that seems impossible in the normal cadence of my life. But, equally important and delicious is a kind of reunion with The World. Oh THERE you are….I often sigh with relief somewhere around the end of the third week, when I’ve been firmly delivered to the first few days of the new year, when the human world around me is completely spent on spending and imbibing and engorging and things go truly truly quiet for a brief period of time.  

Oh there you are.

Oh, there you are. 

Oh….

There is nothing better than that delicious, almost heartbreaking moment when I am rediscovered by The World because I chose to dismount for a moment and walk alongside my well-saddled life.