Trusting in a Return

I keep watching the sky for the swallow’s return. ‘Have you see any yet?’, I ask a local villager. No sightings here, but in other parts of the country, one. The slow return. I need to know the cycle is not broken; that the miracle of these tiny remarkable beings making their way across a continent — across mountains and desert, borders and seas — have made it to their other home, this island on the edge of a continent, offering haven.

The swallow’s return is one of those rhythms in the year I’ve come to rely upon as a marker of continuance. Mid-April I search the sky for darts of forked, swooping brilliance. After wintering, its signalling a summering, with the energy of bloom and birth. It reminds me of cycles and the mystery baked into it all. I take such reassurance in the return.

As in nature, so in life: to trust in the return. It’s been a wintering patch in this tiny corner of my creative life, not the wintering of darkness, but wintering of another kind, of composting. Lettings things fall, allowing time to decompose the constituents. To sense into what wants to be reconstituted is a fecund kind of darkness, too easily overlooked or mistaken as absence. Without the detritus of the harvest, the soil from which new growth emerges can not be sustained.

I am being, perhaps, metaphorically abstract. What do I mean by that in practice, the trusting in the return. Basically, it’s been a quiet patch, in work, in words. Most of the time I have tried to share anything, I’ve had a ‘rabbit in the headlights’ moment, set against what the world is facing and moving through, at times so destructively so. As someone who has relied on words to help them navigate complexity and has taken on an identity as someone capable of articulating responses, my words have felt muted, inadequate and radically falling short. They are only words, after all, and I am only one. I’ve shown up at marches, vigils, protests, but I find myself totally wrung out with tears. What use are tears, I tell myself, feeling somewhat ashamed. Social media too has felt like a minefield, and frequently, not a safe space to share, not just a response to the horrors, but creative output too. I know I am not alone in this.

I see the ‘rabbit in the headlights’ mode in every classroom and teaching space I’ve been in or hosted in the last year. ‘I am only one, and what use are tears/ words/ sadness/ shock’. For some, I see the sense of outrage combusting in anger which has no direction, or snap judgements; students operating on high voltage energy, not knowing how to direct it, or themselves. For others, like myself, there is a desire to retreat. As a response, in learning spaces, I bring in more reflective time, and breathing practices, and I try to create space for meaning making, then afterwards, I need to withdraw too.

I saw this coming in me months ago, and gosh, do I resist. Who am I without the platform/ identity/ role- small as they are, but clearly I am not immune to hitching my identity to the sways of productivity culture and staying relevant. And yet, continual output just hasn’t been an option for me and I realised my activism needs to show up in different ways right now. The introvert in me did some cartwheels when I took my foot off the pedal a bit. The detritus can fall, it was saying, and part of you can too. Time to compost. I just did not expect there to be so much.

And so, over the last year, I’ve intentionally tired to embrace the space, and the silence, which as freelancer who never quite knows when the next ‘gig’ is coming from, is excruciating. My newsletter became more sporadic, my social sharing too. I haven’t wanted to make the full move over to substack yet. I definitely have not wanted to be on X, and defiantly not tiktok. Then, in the midst of all this, one of my dearest soul friends and creative mentors died. Her death so premature filled me with a grief so strong it was as if an equally powerful wave of love moved through me. It is amazing what happens when we allow ourselves to be composted by love. Words started returning, ideas, energy.

Jennifer was someone to whom the creative life was one of the greatest mysteries and miracles, to which she dutifully served. She’d literally put on a pair of working overalls, and headed to her studio each to mine the creative wells for source material. A filmmaker and creative visionary (although she’d hate for me to have called her that — but to me she was), she taught me, among many things, the power of creative cycles and needing to listen to the dream, then follow it. The dream — the creative idea which won’t go away, the calling, the stirring, the story which keeps tugging, the imagination’s tide. Her own film ideas had seeded themselves in literal dreams, then he showed up to her creative practice with devotee levels of steadfastness. The first in her ‘cycle’ of three film, She Sings to the Stars, is completed, and the script for the second film which she had been working on for the precious few years I knew her, was in its final stages of completion. Now that she is not here to complete it, I am not sure that film will ever be made, but in one way it also is —because she listened, brought the story to the page, gave life to the dream. That was Jennifer Corcoran.

After her death, I had a ‘now or never’ moment. A story which had been following me, was tapping, loudly. A bonkers, beauty, wildly erratic story. Now or never, I told myself. And in I went. In the imaginational realm, I’ve found worlds and characters so real to me they feel like companions. In there, is a dangerously beautiful place, which expands my sense of what is real, and possible, of this world too. I know what I’m working on is my own ‘cycle’ of stories. Book one is in a semi-decent draft phase, and daily I am trying to coax it into shape. Book two and three are emerging, slowly. It was this story that took me recently to Mexico, and this story which is leading into places I never thought I’d venture. It’s terrifying. It’s beautiful. I’m listening. Perhaps the silence is only ever an invitation into what really wants to happen.

I am about to go for a walk with Milly. The sky is open, clear. I’ll look up and ask I’ll myself ‘Today?’ Perhaps I’ll see a swallow. But it not today, then soon. Soon. I am trusting in a return.

Writing Prompts:

Perhaps the silence is only ever an invitation into what really wants to happen.
What is your relationship to silence? What is silence inviting you into?

Your now or never.
Write about a ‘now or never’ project you have brewing. Is there a book in you? Or a creative dream? What does it look like? What is holding you back?

Writing Prompts:

Frida

Mexican Wanders

Clare Mulvany