Image description: A hand holds The Lovers Tarot card by Pamela Colman Smith in front of a brown wintered bush.
To listen to me read this Offering aloud, there’s a link at the bottom of this post, just above the source list.
Taking a week off from Offerings felt better than I thought it would. I spent a week out in the country with my partner and dog, without the pressure of a weekly deadline. I saw some therapy clients. I baked pumpkin bread.
One of my oldest friends came to visit. I walked the perimeter of the property twice, sometimes three times a day, practicing recall with Mango. He learns fast, but hasn’t been getting enough practice.
I tend to get anxious in slow times after periods of busyness. It’s like I fixate on things I lacked the time to think about so much before. I was worrying and walking in the woods last week when I noticed something.
I’ve written a lot about intolerance of uncertainty and intolerance of ambiguity. But I actually think there’s something that is much more terrifying, at least for me personally. A lot of my preoccupations have to do with permanence.
The fantasy goes something like this: I’ve transgressed or made a mistake, and there’s no room to maneuver. These situations take shape in my imagination as harms that can’t be undone, sins that won’t be forgiven, and things broken past fixing.
When I get locked into those kinds of thoughts I do my absolute best to remember that they tend to tell lies about what is and is not knowable, and what’s possible to do with it all. If I’m really in the thick of worry, questions about how to move forward tend to get drowned out by the sound of debating right and wrong.
It’s still not that common that I’m able to remember questions about what movement is possible in those moments, but when I can, they are a portal out of a sharp, stuck room.
My week off was not all worrying. It was warmth and rest too. I read a ton. I found a free PDF of Donna Haraway’s essay The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, which I devoured.