Spring comes to Ojai and I am reclaiming the still/empty spaces after a long season of busyness.

This extraordinary valley in which I live is in the fullness of its springtime magnificence: the hills and mountains uncountable shades of green (born of the winter rains and destined to be turned, quite soon, to the browns and golds of summer); the wildflowers at their seasonal peak–poppies, lupine, mustard, monkey flower, wild hyacinth, ceanothus, nightshades, wild peony, and endless others whose names I don’t yet know.

The orange groves that cover the East End of Ojai (where my cottage sits) are awash with creamy white orange blossoms. The air drenched with their intoxicating, bacchanal fragrance. The whole valley vibrating, sun up to sundown, with the unending hum of drunkenly pollinating bees.

It’s impossible to be in Ojai at this time of year and not feel the eruption of spring in every cell of one’s own body!!!

With spring erupting, Easter celebrating resurrection, Passover celebrating deliverance from bondage into freedom–it is the time of rebirth!

For me, in me, this is indeed a rebirthing time! 

I never did write a column for my website in March. I needed to give myself over–yet again and still more completely–to the process of coming back home to stillness and empty time. 

It was out of several years of such stillness/empty time that the website itself emerged. The birthing: The learning of skills/technology I needed. The working through of so many resistances. The inner preparation /willingness to expand and to open outward into the world. These were all part of a process of doing that arose organically out of the empty stillness, the fallow time that came before.  

Through the year and a half of creating and building the site, there was very little still, empty time. Because I was working with the website almost daily, I loosened my, till then, clear boundaries around work-with-clients time.  Instead of keeping my client hours to two days every other week, I was apt to schedule make-up and extra sessions any which where through my weeks. There were few days without some website work or a client session. And, there was very little of my once regular, long stretches of totally unscheduled days. It felt right, even though I’d have occasional nostalgic longings for my “other life.”

From mid-September (when the new, completed site went up) through much of February, it was an uphill struggle of trying to slow back down and reclaim the still/empty spaces in my life.  It had been so easy to gear up into “doing.” It is, after all, how I’d lived my life for so many years.  And, of course, it is the ambient mode in the “real” world. Gearing down is so much harder. Interrupting the momentum requires so much attention and even vigilance. Slowing down, even though I’ve done it again and again after periods of organic doing, requires the building of “escape velocity” to break free of the doing-generated-doings that so easy append themselves to the organic doing. 

Each time I make this downward shift, there is a long, very uncomfortable period of intense restlessness and disorientation.  I seem unable to remember how just to be. My mind pulls back to ideas of things-to-do that could relieve the discomfort/disquiet. It feels as though I’m in withdrawal. In fact, I probably am! 

Part of the way I help myself through this restless disorientation is to commit myself to “doing” nothing, no matter what seductive possibilities arise. Letting go of my usual columns for the site for March was part of this process.

Since the Equinox, I seem, at last–with enormous joy, release and relief–to have found my way back “home.” I am comfortably back in the rhythm of some scheduled days followed by at least a week of unscheduled, empty time.  In these unscheduled weeks, I voluptuously drift in timelessness, following wherever the energy in the moment may lead me. Mostly, I’ve been led into the mountains for long meandering hikes/walks; to long, sensuous naps woven among long hours of reading and, in the still quite chill nights, endless hours of watching the fire. Such bliss!

Originally published April 2001