“You can't force a plant to bloom. It has a cycle. The more experiences you have, the more you begin to understand your own cycle." - Ruth Asawa

the end-of-the-month post

Hi m’dears

Have I ever told you I pull a tarot card when I sit down at my desk each morning? Probably not. In fact I know I haven’t. Because on some level I find it cheesy and embarrassing that I do so. Never mind that I find it useful and helpful to my work and my creative practice. Never mind that I don’t think there’s anything magic, in the Tinkerbell sense, about these commercially printed little pieces of carboard—but rather that they’re just a surprisingly good tool for getting in touch with your own thoughts and feelings and intuition. Still. The cynical Gen X teenager in me still wants to roll her eyes at myself just as hard as I did when my high school ex-boyfriend told me he’d started reading tarot cards his freshman year at UC Santa Cruz. I mean, come on dude. Seriously? Get over yourself. But what can I say? I was wrong.¹ Tarot cards are useful. They just are.

One piece of ease I grant myself is that I don’t try and memorize the card meanings. Instead, I have what’s called a “white book”— a notebook where I’ve written down the different things I’ve learned about each card over the years². So, I pull a card and then I look it up in my little notebook and read all about it, and then I write down a new little note to myself on a separate piece of paper about what I make of its meaning right now. I have zero interest in predicting the future. I’m looking for what I need to know today.

But, even though I’m not trying to memorize anything, simply by virtue of having been doing this for a long time now, I have come to have certain vague associations with the cards. Like I’ll see which one I’ve pulled and usually have some immediate thought like “ooh this is a nice one,” or “oh, darn, this one is boring and dumb.” And while that former assumption is usually correct, that later thought is nearly always dead wrong³.

So this morning I pulled the four of swords. And my first thought was for sure, “yawn, boring card!” It literally has a dude sleeping on it. Or possibly dead? Whatever. He is recumbent. And the meaning is all about taking a break, taking a rest, not working yourself to the bone, blah, blah, blah. It’s like a card perfectly calculated to annoy overachievers and Capricorns (yep, I admit it, I love my astrological sign, too. Gah.)

But I know from experience that if I write my little note I’ll start to notice interesting things. So this is what I wrote:

“A microbreak. A brief rest or retreat amidst the busyness of life. Take time out when you need it, not when it’s convenient. Stop worrying. Relax, lie around, get coffee and watch the world go by. Recharge.”

Which, sure, I thought, sounds smart and nice and all, but not particularly relevant. Not what I need today. I’m not especially exhausted or stressed or in need of a break. I’m in good shape. Whatever. I’ll just get on with things. So I did some work, some email, this and that, and then started on the main thing I needed to do today which was to write this newsletter. Which, to be clear, is something I generally enjoy doing. So I opened up Substack and sat here staring at the screen. And I had nothing. Nothing.

This almost never happens. Usually I have ideas percolating for days or even weeks in the back of my mind ahead of time, stuff I am dying to tell you. Today, my mind was a blank. I suddenly realized I had set myself up for failure. I had tasked myself with writing when I had nothing to write about, which any writer will tell you is the best way to make sure the blank page eats you alive.

Well, shit.

But then I remembered I’d taken a photo of a quotation I really loved up on the wall at the Ruth Asawa art show the other day.⁴ And I thought maybe I could at least use that quote to give myself a title, and perhaps that would spark something (a behind-the-scenes tidbit: sometimes the quotations that form the titles for these posts come right at the start of the process, other times I don’t find them until the very last thing). I couldn’t remember quite what it was, something about plants? And creativity? But I knew I’d liked it a lot. So I pulled out my phone and looked up the photo and this was the quote:

You can't force a plant to bloom. It has a cycle. You have to tend it and care for it and wait for the bloom to happen. If you don't take care of it, it dies. The more experiences you have like this, the more you begin to understand your own cycle.

- Ruth Asawa

Well, shit.

To be clear, I do not believe in The Universe. I do not believe that some invisible hand is conspiring to move me around the chess board. No angels are whispering in my ears to teach me things. But I do believe that someone is trying to tell me something. I just happen to think that the someone in question, is me.

So I got up and left. I went and got lunch at my favorite taqueria. I did some research I needed to do for a client project at a bookstore (its tempting to say that the fact that the bookstore happened to be Green Apple and that I happened to buy myself some books while I was there was incidental, but of course it was not, that was entirely the point). I went and saw an art show at Park Life. I stopped into a bakery and bought a chocolate chip cookie.

Then I came back and sat down and wrote everything you’ve been reading up to this point in a furious burst of enthusiasm.

Now, it might be easy to mistake this for me writing a newsletter about having nothing to write a newsletter about—like those celebrity profiles that spend two-thirds of their word-count talking about how hard it was to track down the celebrity in question. But I think you and I both know that’s not true.

What I’m talking about here is following your own energy. Paying attention to cycles. Tending yourself like a plant. Taking the microbreak, the recharge, not because you’re exhausted and on the verge of collapse, but because breaks and outings and outside stimuli are fun. And meaningful. And joyful. And necessary. Not to mention they are, very frequently, what fuel our creativity.

This is probably the largest lesson of all the great many lessons I’ve been learning since becoming self-employed. (And, trust me, I am deeply aware of what an enormous luxury and privilege it is to get to learn it). Namely: how to follow my own inner rhythms rather than the boss’s clock on the wall.

I am not the person best suited to learn this lesson. I love a routine. I am a creature of habit. I like to start work at a certain time, stop a certain time, eat lunch at a certain time. Sit in my chair and do my work in between those times. Did I mention I’m a Capricorn? But learning how to depart from routine, how to listen, how to get up from my chair, how to wander, how to rest, how to explore, how to learn, how to witness, how to grow, is turning out to be a bona fide revelation.

What’s more, I’m learning to trust that doing such things now and then will not impede me from doing the work I am paid to do. That it will not immediately render me destitute—something I (and I think a great many of us) irrationally fear. Of course, not everyone can step away from work for a couple of hours like I did. That’s why I point out that it’s a luxury. But we all get to choose what we do on our lunch breaks, on our commutes, during our mornings, evenings, weekends, vacation days. Not to mention the manner in which we do our actual work, which is a topic for another day.

And, for those of us lucky enough to set our own schedules, this kind of reset in fact does just the opposite of bringing on the penury we fear it might induce—rather feeding and fueling both personal work and paid work, versus taking away from them in any significant way.

All of this thinking and experience has opened up whole new avenues of work and life and thought and art that I know I am still only just beginning to understand. Fast approaching 50, I find myself in the early stages of a journey, which is a goddamn exciting, if also at times perplexing, place to be. I am getting better at listening to myself. Better at knowing when to hit the eject button. You now only have to tell me twice.

New Books

One of the other very fun things about having been freelancing for over a year and a half now is that I’m starting to get finished copies of some of the books and things I’ve worked on, particularly those from right when I started out. Holding real objects in your hot little hands, having them out there in the wide world — there’s nothing better man. These ones are:

The Messy Magical Muse Deck, self-published by Robbyn Layne

A Fearless Eye: The Photography of Barbara Ramos, published by Chronicle Books

Waterline, an exhibition catalog zine self-published by Christa Grenawalt

Mars: Photographs from the NASA Archives, published by Taschen

Links

Image from The San Francisco Standard; courtesy of Adam Rouse

It’s been quite a while since I’ve rounded up for you the links that have caught my eye and my imagination. Here you go!

• This is a decade old but I somehow only just now discovered it. A video series in which the actors Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal reenact Calvin and Hobbes comic strips. Perfection.

• The article that originally introduced me to City Hope Café—were I now happily volunteer—about lauded SF pastry chef Michelle Polzine, formerly of Twentieth Century Café, and her transition to baking for homeless folks at City Hope.

• An incisive look at how truly misguided and stupid chain stores like CVS and Target are for locking up all their personal care products behind plexiglass.

• An ode to a rare and beautiful San Francisco home you’ve probably never seen or heard of, built by George Homsey, one of the founders of Sea Ranch, with a fascinating history and exquisite photos.

Bar

I had the great good fortune of engaging in actual prolonged, fun, meaningful, and productive conversation with my own husband the other day. Ranging widely over many topics but focusing in particular on solving one of those complicated logistical conundrums that quick chats over the dinner dishes when you’re both tired at the end of the day can never quite seem to solve. It started on a long scenic bus ride but ended up at a gorgeous new bar called Maritime in the middle of the afternoon. I recommend this place. They are very friendly and will serve you mocktails and toast while you listen to moody 80s music and solve all your own problems.

Mix Tape

No one will ever show you love more sincerely yet obliquely than a cynical Gen X friend with a carefully crafted hour-long playlist made just for you:

xo

b

All bookshop.org links are affiliate links. Thanks for bearing with me in late-state capitalism!

1. I mean, all boys at UC Santa Cruz circa 1994 probably did need to get over themselves, but just in a general sense.

2. I started this practice in Susanna Conway’s excellent class 78 Mirrors and added to it with info I got from Michelle Tea’s great book Modern Tarot and Allison M. Garcia’s Tarot mini-zine as well random info from googling and landing on the sites of people like Brigit Esselmont, and just lately I’ve been exploring and enjoying a new book, Tarot for Creativity by Chelsey Pippin Mizzi.

3. With the exception of the Hierophant — I cannot for the life of me get my head around what the hell that card is good for — if you have an exciting and empowering interpretation of that card, by all means lay it on me!

4. Much much more about that show in the upcoming start-of-the-month Art! post, very soon! It is mind-blowing!