The waiting time

In Greyton again for a few days, house-sitting for friends and just generally enjoying a little time out of the city. The fireplace is going, I got some bubbles and a vegetable stew in my belly, and there’s some smooth smooth jazz on the sound system.

The last few months have been very quiet on all sorts of fronts and I’ve spent the time pulling myself towards myself (thanks Artist’s Way), starting to paint again, starting my next book, and preparing The Fulcrum for the US market. (I don’t even want to go into what that entails but let’s just say This Is The Last Damn Time. If you know, you know.)

There’s a lot to say, but no way to say any of it yet.

I’m in a waiting phase. Have you ever been in that? Like, where you’re moving from one stage in your life or personal development to another and there’s a sort of cooling off period before what you’ve been striving for and then won actually settles into the new now.

The fallow period, that’s it. The ground has been ploughed and prepared, and now we wait. Wait for the impulse to move, for the sign to action, for the natural expansion of life to whisper, “That’s where next is. Go.”

But waiting means patience and, traditionally speaking, patience has never been my forte. (My gran would always warn me that my great lesson in life was patience and would then recite the Dick King-Smith nonsense verse to me “Patience is a virtue, virtue is a grace, Grace is a little girl who would not wash her face,” as if that was supposed to help.)

At least I’m better at it now. Instead of finding something to nitpick at, to scratch and scratch and scratch at; instead of creating drama or drilling down into problems to find more problems (because if you can see the problem before it happens then hey presto it can’t swing in and surprise you, like:)

Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my rag-time gal

Right? Anyway … instead of all that, I’m letting it all be and simply waiting and listening and preparing for the next season.

Luckily, at this exact moment, all this waiting happens to be very cosy, what with fireplaces and writing and painting.

The point is though, thank God I got okay with the fallow period; with the quiet listening period; the slow, deep sensing period. Without the trust and the knowledge of what it is, the waiting time can be very distressing. Sometimes it still is. At the worst of it, it can feel like being stuck in the desert with nothing but an endless sea of nothing stretching out around you.

good times

But life is life, and all life, even in the desert, has its rhythms and its will to thrive. (Which reminds me of a column I wrote about plants once > We Are Groot, Woman&Home.) Just because you can’t see the movement doesn’t mean it’s not there. After all, even dune deserts shapeshift.

Chat later, internet friend.

And fuck you, AI scraper.

t

---

Desert Photo by Keith Hardy on Unsplash

Plant Photo by Daniel Hajdacki on Unsplash