Habits for the hollow moon
Thinking about purpose and then laughing at myself
It’s fall in the northern hemisphere. Equinox is a good time to look at patterns and do a little life check-in. Tally up what is good and what is lacking. Check the stores for the coming winter. Perhaps the cellar is full of apples, but is your heart filled enough to make it through the cold?
Here are some of the self-inquiries I made in my journal today:
What am I most grateful for?
What are my seeds of discontent?
What kind of people am I surrounded by?
What would I like to bring into my life?
What would I like to release?
What is the highest and best life I envision for myself?
In what ways am I already living it?
I won’t share all I wrote in response, though I encourage you to take a crack at answering them for yourself. I will tip my hat to the people of Koh Phangan, though, in the passage I wrote about who I’m surrounded by:
Well, I can’t generalize too much, because these all may just be a projection of myself. But I’ve found a lot of kind artists. Kind artists who are looking for self-discovery and community. Intuitive types with spiritual hems to their being, stretching out and searching or folding on their laps in meditation. People healing who want the world to heal. And then also some folks who are looking for themselves through others; quick to party and dance, hoping to kiss away some pain.
Thanks, folks, for your community and your art and your kisses.
Each month, I budget one gift for myself. It’s always a self-development sort-of-something. A workshop, a plant medicine ceremony, a meeting with a medium; whatever is available that month that strikes the chords of my heart.
This system works great because it’s all I can afford. But also, if what I’ve picked is as impactful as I hope, it takes about a month to integrate, anyway.
In August, I double-booked myself. Doing both a weekend of Jungian shadow work and the vipassana which y’all have heard a bit about. Risky, but I reasoned it was safe. First, because the vipassana was free, though I did give the suggested donation of $30 USD. And second, I figured the week of silence would maybe help integrate the shadow work.
Maybe it’s from doing such heavy subconscious lifting last month (that made me laugh—imagining a really confused bodybuilder lifting weights in a dark room). Or maybe I’m just not feeling too motivated. But September has been comparatively lackluster. The end of the month was drawing nearer, and at the beginning of this week I still hadn’t figured out what my little self-present could be.
Then I thought of Kevin Wilson. A phenomenal author and one of my favorite creative writing professors in university, I was in his advanced writing class around the time he started having to do publicity gigs for his most recent book. He disliked a lot of the travel and interviewing; found it inconvenient, if not a little tedious. We gleefully listened as he griped. He’s a delightfully sardonic guy. But at one point in an interview, he had to address the rumor, which was fact, that he wrote his award-winning novel in ten days.
The reality was, he only had that much time. The gift he and his wife give to each other (both writers) is one week, each, per year, that they get to go be in the woods or wherever and be completely alone. The other mans the fort and watches the kids and does the normal human stuff.
He’d been thinking of the story, letting it pressure cook in his brain, for about a year. But he only had that time in the woods to get it on paper.
So. Why don’t I give that to myself? Maybe not a week, but at least a few days? Maybe to write, but also to just be alone?
Another monthly habit I have is to notice the moon. For the last five years, I’ve done my best to pay attention to its waxing and waning.
On full moons, as it starts shedding itself back to black, I set intentions of what I’d like to release from my life. Last full moon, I set the intention to remove distractions. As I sit alone, the sole occupant of a beach resort only accessible by foot or boat, I can check that box. I gave myself the Kevin Wilson treatment, just for two days.
Now the moon is hollow. It’ll have grown to a sliver again by tomorrow night. What would I like in my life, in me, to grow with it?
I’ve found that a genuine realization always comes as a slightly familiar surprise. Like when you’re speaking a foreign language and you spill out words you didn’t know you knew. You’re surprised by them, but the meaning has been sitting inside you, waiting, for some time.
I reread the modest body of work which is my book so far. I can’t say whether it’s good or bad. I try not to focus on that too much. Today I read a sentiment in Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life that I greatly agree with:
“The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitos to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.”
But rereading writing which I labored fiercely over earlier in the year, I remembered more clearly what my aim is with all this wordplay. To tell a rather powerful and tragic and then (ideally) hopeful story about a mother and son. Not many people would intentionally pluck a book on suicide from a library shelf; I imagine the people most interested in reading it will have lost someone. Or have been suicidal themselves, at some point. My hope, at its core, is to help those people. To connect people through stories. To know they’re not alone, in depression or grief. And to know it’s not final, not the end nor unending.
Today’s reflection dredged up the feeling of genuine realization. It took all day, writing around and around it until finally, a pointedly honest clause jutted out. I was surprised, slightly, then followed the thread.
I feel under-challenged. My writing is disjointed. It’s difficult to imagine as a consolidated body of work, as amassing into a single story.
I say I want to help people, but I don’t feel or see myself helping people in my present life. I hope the book will help people. Even thinking of the book as my ‘goal,’ what then? It’ll be written, but my life pushes beyond it.
Even when I was working in psychology, there were days when I was sure I wasn’t helping anybody. So being “helpful” is just another mind-state, I suppose.
And I know there’s merit in just being in community. That I “help” people just by being myself, just by listening and talking and writing. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just living in the future.
My paid work, at present, feels very, well, present. Someone needs a blog? I write it. It’s done. Bam. (Speaking of which, here’s what I just wrote about desert sunrises in Morocco.) It doesn’t lead anywhere. Where’s my calling, endowed with greater meaning and purpose? Or should I even care about that? Isn’t the concept of “greater purpose” just a supposition of the future, anyway?
It's worth noting that while I was contemplating my life’s purpose and watching the light fade from the sky, the completely empty resort I’m in was blasting Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me” on its speakers. I don’t know who they were playing it for. I laughed to myself, grateful for the levity. I get wayyy too heady, sometimes.
Anyway, these are questions I don’t fight for an answer to. It’s wasted sweat. Whatever I’ll learn from doing, I’ll learn just as much from not doing. I try to remind myself of that when I’m caught in tense deliberation or spun in what feels like a coin toss of fate.
As Rainer Maria Rilke says,
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves… Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
So, thank you, Kevin, for the getaway inspiration. And thank you to the other kind artists who surround me in life, whether in books or in person or over the loudspeakers of my getaway home. And thank you moon, for growing and shrinking and reminding me that I’m always opening and closing, like a truly living thing.
As a good natured Hobbit myself, I love any advice that reminds me of the subtle ancient art of non-doing. Beautiful words. I also love the image of you being deep in thought on a sandy beach, looking at the sunset as you think of the next thing to write, and the camera pans in front of you, to see the lone DJ playing Shaggy.