Emergence & the Fertile Void

Becoming Still Long Enough to Birth the New

“If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.”

⟡ Rainer Maria Rilke

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.”

⟡ Mary Oliver

“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.”

⟡ Ecclesiastes 3:1

This is the greening time in Northern California. The season of mist and rain, of bracken ferns and wild mushrooms and bright red madrone berries. January. The start of a new year when, with our lofty intentions and the (sometimes so ingrained they go unrecognized) expectations of the over culture propelling us onward, we resolve to begin anew.

As I write this letter to you, a polar vortex has covered much of the country in a thick blanket of snow. Here in the coastal mountains of the Pacific Northwest where we live, an “atmospheric river” coupled with a rare “bomb cyclone” has brought torrential rain and high winds for days on end. The trunks of a great many trees have been snapped in half like twigs and still others have been ripped up at the roots. A fairly large Oak even fell on our goat barn. A powerful reminder of how fierce Mother Nature can be.

 As the nearby Russian River swells and the seasonal creeks on our land are overflowing their banks, both of our passages off of the mountain are currently impassable due to flooding and debris. So we have no choice but to hunker down and nestle in. In some ways, it feels like a holiday  – a welcome excuse to take a break from work on the land and be cozy inside by the woodstove, to gaze out the window at the sideways rain with a hot mug of warm cocoa (made with raw goat milk, of course!) and let myself be carried away by dreaming. It is Winter afterall.

There is another part of me though that feels the urgency to push forward in the direction of my freshly avowed goals for this new year, the pressure to be “productive”.  The art of resting is something that doesn’t come easily for perpetual-motionites like me. Pausing for too long often makes me feel restless, triggering my mind into an unfounded but familiar fear that if I slow down too much I may begin to stagnate somehow. Perhaps a trauma response as “over-doing” can sometimes be. And yet, if I listen to my animal body, she is telling me she wants to move slow, to stretch and yawn and linger. To slip into that liminal space, the womb of creativity, the place of gestation where we float in the fertile void from which all things ultimately emerge.  

I look out toward the garden to the log hive where the bees are clustered together humming for warmth & dreaming in the dark. I imagine the deer bedded down in the sheltering cove of the forest somewhere, the rhythm of their breathing knitting their hearts closer together as they wait for the storm to pass. And what of the poppy seeds in their cradle of thick wet mud, holding, in stillness, the blueprint of their delicate petals as yet unseen?

A woman leans over a deep well. The surface is so still she can see her own reflection. She is water gazing, waiting for images to rise to the surface., messages from the beyond — the ancient practice of scrying also known as hydromancy.

Before she is able to make out the appearance of divine messages though, she must first cultivate the capacity within herself to see. Every true artist also knows this. There is the act of creation but, first, there is an emptying out of the self. A clearing of the channels for creativity to flow. A floating in the vast sea from which all things manifest.  This is the process of emergence, the process of coming into being, of surfacing – arising from spaciousness and the mysterious well of the collective unconscious.

So, as the rain falls and the winds swirl their chaos magic on this wild afternoon at the end of the first week of January, I draw a deep breath in and let go. I soften into this moment. I lean into the embrace of empty space and feel a glimmer stir in the center of my chest. Perhaps it’s the faint rustle of my longing traveling toward me from a great distance, carrying a song that is mine and mine alone…but, for it to make it all the way to me, I have to allow myself to get quiet enough to hear that still small voice drawing near over the incessant hustle and bustle of the all too civilized world.

As the novelist Frank Herbert once wrote, “Beginnings are such delicate times.” As we all ease into this new year, may we practice gentleness towards ourselves and honor our natural rhythms, giving ourselves, if only for a brief time, to the fertile void from which all beauty and the inception of every great and wholly original idea arises.