the way forward is awkward

This is the newsletter version of Sara by the Season, where I explore what is piquing my curiosity as I try to lean into nature’s wisdom and rhythms. You can listen to me read you the newsletter by hitting play above - or you can click the little link above and to the right to play in your favorite podcast player. If you know someone who would like this sort of thing, I’d be so grateful if you would share it.

In the northern hemisphere, we celebrated the Fall Equinox last week. It is one of my favorite days of the year. I love the signal it sends to turn inward, to slow down, to step further into the darkness. I don’t love that it ushers in what I call “surrender season.” Surrendering is not my strong suit. I’m a first born daughter, so control is much more my speed.

A few months ago, I read (or heard? Now I can’t find it in any of my note-keeping spots) something along these lines: what if the system depends on a little bit of resistance to keep perpetuating its power? The argument went that all that we do to resist the things that fire us up - climate action, gun reform, fighting the -isms - actually helps keep the system going because it needs something to push against in order to keep moving¹.

It is sort of like in parenting where you want your kids to mess up in smaller ways while they’re living with you, so that you can help them navigate the failure together. The hope being that, once they are older and their problems get bigger, they can rely on those earlier lessons to help them handle bigger challenges. If you protect your kid from every possible failure, you’re setting them up for disaster when failure inevitably comes knocking. Raising humans requires some resistance or else they’re just robots.

So this argument goes that the system² thrives on a little bit of resistance to keep people blind to the overarching problems the system perpetuates. What we resist, persists. So by having just enough resistance - but not too much! - the system keeps churning along.

That is damn depressing, frankly.

But, if true, offers us a new way of thinking about the biggest problems that we are collectively facing. Bayo Akomolafe says something similar in this interview:

We need something more than solutions. We need something more than that binary of a question and an answer. We need a third invitation. What could be a playful transversal disruption of a question-answer binary? Bewilderment.

And that’s the gift. We are being given the gift of confusion, but our knowledge paradigms respond to uncertainty by trying to stuff more data in so that it’s not awkward. But locality will speak. The world has its own intelligence.

If we stay with the awkwardness of this moment, if we embrace it, as part of what we want to do as a company, as an organization, as a community, and as a collective, then we might find new ways of framing our problems and thinking about the world. So, the way isn’t forward, the way is awkward.

The way forward is awkward. I love that. He talks often in other places about “becoming fugitive,” which I think is another way of saying the same thing. It’s the same thing Audre Lorde warns us about: “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” If we think about what would be awkward or fugitive to the current state of affairs, it opens the door to new ways forward.

I’m wondering, as we enter the fall season, if one way of being fugitive to the way things are is actually a returning to the way things were instead of hustling to imagine something shiny and new. For much of human history, the natural world’s rhythms dictated our lives. These days, many of us can ignore the natural world for days at a time. It might be time consuming, uncomfortable, and awkward to try to return to living more in tune with the natural world³, but my bet is that it offers us wisdom, connection, joy, and rest along the way.

American culture acts as if we live in a perpetual summer, so it is fugitive to the system to turn inward in the fall and winter, to do less, to rest more, to do nothing. A few years ago, I heard a Buddhist teaching about surrender, in which the teacher said that “letting go” in Buddhist texts might be better translated as “letting be.” That felt more accessible to me than letting go. Letting be feels less active, more passive, like I could just set things down for a bit and come back to them if I need to.

I’m curious for myself if this fall (at least) is a time to let things be as a way of practicing the awkward, fugitive way Bayo talks about. Earlier this year, Holly wrote a great piece about how disoriented we all are, collectively right now on this side of the pandemic and everything else the last several years have brought. I love the way she ended it, and I think it makes a great invitation to letting be season:

I’m not sure what point I’m trying to make here, and maybe that is what the point is: that perhaps we’re not supposed to try so hard to make it all make sense, or come up with some unified theory to save us from experiencing what is happening. Maybe we’re supposed to feel insecure. Maybe this is the time we’re supposed to dissolve instead solidify. Maybe the new narrative comes when we begin to make room for it. Maybe right now, we’re just supposed to be lost.

Scattering Seeds

I’m always finding stuff that supports the thesis of the book I’m writing on the benefits of leaning into nature’s wisdom, as well as other things related to this newsletter’s topic that maybe didn’t fit into the actual newsletter, so I thought I could start sharing those links and things here with all of you in hopes of some of the seeds I share germinating into something beautiful at your place.

• Alexander Beiner seems to be offering a fugitive way of finding more connection - again by going back to our older ways to myth as a way of opposing the shallowness of social media.

• I think the last days of Jesus reflect a pattern we see often in life: Friday (the dying), Saturday (the waiting), and Sunday (the rising). This is not an original thought, and many of our wisdom traditions offer similar patterns of understanding the world. Elise writes about how we miss the Saturday - rushing straight from the Friday thing to the Sunday thing. I think she is, in a way, talking about what letting be season requires: “This past week, I realized in order to bring it down and spill it into the horizontal—to pin this next phase down with words—I need to go into the tomb. I need to mourn the end of one process in order to prepare myself for the next. I don’t think I had been thinking about it quite that way, convinced that I could monkey bar my way through. But now, I recognize that I have to let go, to let myself drop, to let myself fall into the unknown, the void. To let myself feel unmoored, unfixed, unrealized.”

Cheers to letting it be awkward,

Sara

1. Because of how much I listen to Bayo Akomolafe and because this sounds like one of his ideas, I’m guessing this originated from him, but I can’t find it anywhere. If you have a source, I’d love to link it.

2. I’m using “system” generically to refer to whatever we will eventually call this post-capitalist overculture we find ourselves in.

3. Reminder to myself and to you that there is no nature out there; we are nature. Reconnecting with the natural world is essential to reconnecting with ourselves.