Spring Tower
A March Reading List
During this month’s Full Moon Drawing, two cards popped out of the deck. I hesitated to take them both, as tradition says it is a single card draw, but my wife (“not me, The Cards”) insisted they were both mine. With a bad feeling, I flipped them and almost expectantly revealed the most dreaded of cards: The Tower. The second, well, I hardly paid any attention to him at all. At least, not until the final quarter of the month. What did it matter? I drew The Tower. What could some measly pip card do for me as I lived in its long shadow?
I did not have to wait long for this ill omen to bear fruit. Just a couple days after its reveal, I came down with something nasty. It gave me a raging headache, a twisted stomach, and sapped me of all energy. For several days, I totally lost my appetite, my ability to concentrate, and felt constantly exhausted. I took to sleeping in, at least as much as my schedule allows, and forgoing my early morning writing sessions. By the time that sick spell passed, the in-laws had arrived to stay with us for our daughter’s first birthday, and after that it was Spring Break. For the rest of my family, that is, who got a week off from teaching and daycare. With this change in schedule, I elected to take another week off, so that by mid-March I had not written a thing, nor did I much feel like it. I was in a creative funk. Not only had writing lost all appeal, I couldn’t even settle on anything to listen to on my commute. No music sounded good, none of my podcasts held any interest. During this time, the allure of my phone seemed to increase. I was called to doomscroll, to gaze into the horrors we were committing in Iran. To be, once again, aghast at the cruel stupidity and stupid cruelty of my home land; in the face of which, a handful of weeks without writing is nothing.
I’ve been doing this with some consistency since I was sixteen. That’s over half my life now spent devoted to writing. You Shall Write Every Day is a maxim I have left far behind and am all the better for it. I usually feel like I know writing’s place in my life, and while it is one of great value I fully accept this is never turning into a career for me, but, being the stupid Spiritual Gumshoe that I am, I often forget that an Artistic Practice is no replacement for a Spiritual Practice, so a long dry spell like this still sometimes represents something like a crisis of faith, especially when it concurs with such outward, overwhelming events.
As a seasoned Spiritual Gumshoe, however, I have at least learned not to traverse these streets without my bag of tools, and, when feeling so lost as this, I eventually will remember how helpful it is to stop and consult Ramsey Dukes’ compass. Here, we see that Art and Religion both trek North, guided by Intuition, but they diverge easterly and westerly depending on whether that Intuition is paired with Feeling or Thinking, so treating Writing as a Spiritual Practice is something like trying to travel East and West at the same time. It simply can’t be done and trying to do so will tear you in two.
That’s bad news for me who once again finds myself alone with my carpet bag on the cosmic road. I spent a steady year practicing zazen daily and was beginning to think I’d finally found my path, but when Baby came along my routine was totally changed and now I am more than a year out of habit; my zafu eyes me from the corner of my room like a neglected houseplant that I just can’t work up the energy to water.
While that, no doubt, remains a problem to be addressed, it is a separate-ish problem. When I release writing from my requirement for it to be both Art and Religion, it no longer strains against itself. It becomes free to bound off in its given direction. This is easier said than done, and it only happened for me (this time) when I put it aside completely for a little bit and, quite literally, tended my garden. We spent a couple weekends clearing the native flower beds of last year’s dead growth—you want to leave that shit in place until you see new growth. Your neighbors might not appreciate the sight of dead plant matter, but that’s Home for some very helpful insects.
Next, we went to war against encroaching weeds. I made the mistake last year of letting some giant ragweed go to seed in the green alley behind our yard and its babies jumped the fence and are going to town amongst my yarrow, flame acanthus, and rock rose. After much careful plucking of ragweed shoots, I mulched the blackberry bramble to hopefully allow for easier access for curious toddlers this summer. Then I removed the turf from another corner of our yard and planted some fall aster, Greg’s mistflower, and coral honeysuckle as we continue our project of returning our tiny plot to something closer to its native state—a job we hope our landlord will appreciate as much as the butterflies!
Finally it was time for the most temperamental patch of all: the vegetables. In Texas, you never can be too sure when the final freeze of winter is going to blow down out of Oklahoma. It’s just as likely to occur in February as it is in April. You don’t want to plant your veggies before it, but you also don’t want to wait too long because summer has a habit of stepping on spring’s toes around here, and if your veggies aren’t well established they’re going to get fried by the heat. After consulting my father-in-law, who, like all self-taught gardeners, has his own personal mixture of scientific knowledge and esoteric beliefs, I decided it was time.
I sowed another winter’s worth of our homemade compost into the dense, red clay soil of our backyard, yanked the bindweed shoots that had recently emerged, cursed their leviathan root system twisting far beneath my feet, and finally popped my cucumber, corn, green bean, and zucchini seeds straight into the ground. The tomatoes and peppers I started in pots. And for five days immediately afterwards, we were blessed with mild spring temperature and plenty of rain. Pop, ye old wizard!
Just the other side of that, though, came a couple nights that dipped to a degree or two above freezing. And a week later, it soared towards a record breaking mid-nineties.
Despite this whiplash, more than enough plants have survived to fill my garden bed, and according to the forecast things are leveling out again for the next couple weeks, so here’s to hoping for a bountiful yield in the months to come! Even should another heat wave or cold snap steal away many of these young plants, they have already paid dividends. Something about being in such close communication with the Earth unlocked me and I felt a great creative energy return and have rushed to keep up. This was the influence of that second card, the Eight of Wands: “It represents frenetic, spontaneous, and erratic movement as well as the struggle to focus and direct that energy. It is the card of sudden excitement and fast journeys.”
When an old tree dies in the forest, there is a sudden in-breaking of sunlight into what was for so long shaded by its canopy. Seeds that have lay dormant in the soil suddenly spring to life as there is a mad rush to lay claim to the new niche. Likewise, after nearly a month without writing pretty much anything, I feel suddenly bubbling with ideas again. Not only for writing, but there’s this new vitality in my listening. I’m fighting the urge to break into a new medium and to start in on Language Transfer’s Spanish courses. I must remind myself that all these shoots will be competing for the limited sunlight and nutrients, that many will have to die off for any one of them to thrive. But hey, that’s not the worst problem to have and having my hands in the dirt was certainly one component of breaking out of this holding pattern—hence the continued plant analogies— but there were others.
You get out what you put in, they say, and there were a few choice pieces of art that helped me along my way, but for that you will have to pay the man at the door. And do it quick. Things have been getting rather precarious around here. We pay him what we can, but still…he’s been getting a little desperate, and who can blame him? Have you seen the price of gas?
