Elul is all about alignment – it sheds light on where there is ease and contradiction in the past year. That evaluation can inspire recalibration and wholeness. May these snippets spark ways of locating where you are in the midst of this reflection.
I am singing in the car again. Windows down, hands gliding through the rushing air with speakers all the way up. I often listen to podcasts to keep my brain engaged, but music allows for a different embodiment. It started as a Spotify Radio playlist based on Ahli, then led to this single by Sophie Holohan. “Cognitive Dissonance” has an upbeat vibe paired with a psychological exploration that helped me unwind some mental knots.
The library is a close friend of mine. As someone late to the fiction game, I have been checking out books across the map. Yes, I love a nonfiction learning moment, filling the pages with notes and questions with my Pilot G-2 0.38 pen (the only kind I use #Virgo), but there’s something about knawing on a good story.
Take a peak at what is currently piled high on my nightstand:
From top left across, then bottom left across:
The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley
Any Other City by Hazel Jane Plante
The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey
The Nightingale Affair by Timothy Mason
The Marigold by Andrew Sullivan
Homebodies by Tembe Denton-Hurst
Caveat: I have yet to finish any of these books and am in moral turmoil about when to, in fact, return them to the library regardless of their due dates, so honest reviews are pending. I also rarely read books by white cis-men (see this post about literally that), so the two listed above are going extra out on a limb. Wish me luck!
As an avid Jenny Odell fan, I bring in her wisdom wherever possible. I am still in the midst of reading Saving Time: Discovering Life Beyond the Clock and the following stood out to me:
“There’s a pattern here: With a zeitgeber, someone or something is always giving time to someone else – not in the sense of gifting them minutes and hours, but in the sense of determining their experience of time. To follow a zeitgeber is to become entrained; your activities become entrained to patterns outside of you; or others must become entrained to yours. But, as anyone with a chronic illness who works a nine-to-five knows, different zeitgebers can conflict, and not all are created equal. Just as different peoples’ hours have different ‘rental prices,’ some people are compelled by external structures to entrain to the lives of others.”
– Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering Life Beyond the Clock (p. 57-8)
Consider – perhaps as a journal prompt:
What current zeitgebers pull on your time?
How do they balance or upset one another?
How does awareness of these patterns and pulls change your relationship to time?
It’s deep summer, slow heat in the midst of back-to-school season. We are on the edge of a seasonal shift, but not quite there.
Let’s metaphorically roll the windows all the way down.
Take a solo walk around your neighborhood or a body of water without listening to music or a podcast, without calling someone or adding distractions. Let the world around you be your soundtrack. Notice the wildness, greet people along your path, and feel one foot in front of the other. See what comes through.
Sending ease your way and until next time,
Metabolite is a full moon offering of bite-sized ways to align your actions with your values and integration step section of When Holy Sparks Fly. In case you missed it, you can read The Metabolite launch announcement.