So I talk a lot about this kind of art commune I like to visit on Toronto Island. One time I was out there in the dead of winter, and was crunching along the frozen beach when I saw this woman standing right at the freezing water’s edge, looking out at the slate-coloured waves as they rolled in, almost inseparable from the colour of the sky. 

I don’t really remember what she was wearing, but I feel like it was woollen and long and cloaky, her hair was up in a bun with tendrils twisting in the wild wind, and she was smoking a long cig.

Later I would come to know she was an improvisational dance artist and a self-identified witch living for a month with her partner in one of the portables out back of the main building (the whole set up is a made-over old school). Portable people are rarely seen due to having their own hotplates out there, so when they come to the communal kitchen to do dishes or on their way back from a shower, they seem to me like celebrities.

Anyway, turned out this witch partly made her living reading the Tarot, and susceptible as I always am to fortune-telling hoo-ha, I am far more so when I’m islandside and living with the people in my head all day long.

So we hooked up an appointment, she came to my studio, burnt some sage, lit some candles, and off we went. It was very moving and awesome and akin to therapy in a lot of ways, but with pretty pictures and also ones of skeletons. And she said to me something that will always stay with me:

“Like a lot of December babies, you have a tendency to really party and let things go, and then suddenly you say, ‘Enough! Rein it in!’ And then you rein it in.”

She explained that this was because I have the reverberations of all my ancestors partying it up around solstice time, then pulling it together when they realize they ate, like, all the dried meat and pickles, and burned way too much wood.

It would be an understatement to say that this resonated. This revelation bonged through my body like yes, right, exactly.

I mean, I feel like this goes back to my earliest days. I remember how, starting in grade two or so, we’d have clean-out-your-desk day and some folks would be done and chatting within ten minutes. 

Meanwhile, I’d be sweating in a hell of shame for the entire allotted half-hour, unearthing long-lost handouts, dead pens, broken pencils, library books I’d left for dead and, worst of all, bags of fruit so rotted and mouldy it was unrecognizable. I only knew they were fruit because that’s what my loving mother sent with me for my recess snack every day. Sometimes I just didn’t feel like it, you know? Fine. But why didn’t I throw it out? Or take it back home? Why did I leave it to rot?

Of course there was a pretty intense surge of delight when I would finish the cleaning process. I’d create two neat piles in there: text books on one side, workbooks and binders on the other, all sorted according to size, biggest on the bottom. Pens lined up in the tray at the front with military precision.

What’s relevant here, I think, is that when it was all tidy again, I would think to myself, sternly, with a mixture of self-loathing and love, “Never. Again. This is the last time. You’ve changed, sister, you’ve changed! You will keep up with this, right down to the books in perfect pyramids. Fruit will be eaten, dead pens thrown away. You will never, never, never shoot so much time un-entombing yourself from a mess again.

Lolol. I have thought this same, “Never again,” thought to absolutely no avail for my entire life, and have been un-entombing myself from messes every couple of months in spite of valiant efforts to follow cleaning programs from the internet, embody the systems of productivity gurus, establish some good goddamn habits. Nothing. It all, always, goes to fucking seed.

***

Luckily, my winter witch stayed with me long enough that day for me to basically grab her by the collar of her robes and beg her to tell me how to fix this thing.

She politely suggested that rather than trying to fix it, I pay attention to it instead.

Okay. 

The first step toward “paying attention” was grilling everyone I knew if this is just December babies or just me or what. The result of this rigorous study is that it seems to resonate with lots of folks, and for some it doesn’t.

My partner, for example, seems to not have the total unfurling period, nor does he have the bolts of buzzy energy I get where I tidy up my fraying life. For what it’s worth, he was born in the temperate late Spring.

Somehow this thing about the birthdays helped me for the first time imagine this difference between us as something about inherent constitution versus glaring evidence of my being a shittier person.

I am trying – still trying – not to judge the loose, loopy, baggy periods, the party periods, the ceding-to-entropy-times too harshly. Not so harshly that I get so down it becomes a formidable effort to seize back the day in a stellar period of reining it in. I am trying to just know that time will come, and I will be ready when it does.

I am trying to think through what my body-mind might be doing during those looser periods. Am I digesting information? Resting up for the big push? 

Given that I’ve had these phases my whole life, I wonder if there might be some good reason why. I’m trying now to look at them with real curiousity instead of derision.

I am trying not to hate everything about myself except the parts that are clearly overtly socially acceptable, or money-making, or super-productive, or altruistic, or evidence of my supposedly giant brain, or otherwise deserving of the wild applause I so constantly crave.

Trying.

***

As I started paying attention, I realized I can learn a lot on this topic from how I write. I generally write up a big mess in my notebook first – shitty, go-nowhere drafts – then reign it in on the computer through loads of trial and error.

And it’s okay. It works. Eventually. It took a super-long time for me to come to terms with this process (another story for another day), and frankly I still find myself wishing a lot that it didn’t have to be that way. I wish I could sit down and type out paragraphs fully formed. 

I wish that I could clean twenty minutes a day, and habituate yoga so hard that not doing it would feel like not putting on pants. I still like the reining it in phase way, way better. Maybe everybody does. I don’t really know.

But I’m going to keep paying attention. Many thanks to my winter witch.