Fermentation Time

On our need for seasons to let things prove.

Kombucha with scoby from Unsplash

I was in a session with my spiritual director the other day. If you don’t know about spiritual direction, sometimes known as spiritual accompaniment, you should. It’s an old discipline which has grown out of the Christian tradition, but there are increasingly people doing this work on the edges between communities or rooted in other wisdom paths. I think of mine as somewhere between therapist and coach but with a laser focus on the health of my soul. I don’t know what I would do without her. I am sure I would be (more?) de-formed by these times. If you’d be interested in finding one, this site is a good place to start for UK people, or my friend

Vanessa Chamberlin

has recently started practicing (she’s especially good for artists). If you know of others you’d recommend, please add them in the comments.

Anyway, I digress. I was in a session with my spiritual director, deep in a conversation about grief and joy and the stories I tell about them, when I realised I was half consciously shaping my thoughts into a post to put on here. I knew I had a deadline coming up, and the well was otherwise empty, so….

This brought me up short. Sure, some of the stuff I am learning is worth sharing. Or I hope it is. I have to actually learn it first though, live it, let it prove before discerning if any of it might be of use to anyone else. Yes, I am thinking deeply about the relationship between grief and joy, but some close-to-home challenges combined with the wider global context means I have, honestly, mainly been in survival mode. I kid you not, some days recently I have felt like Macbeth, walking around rolling my eyes and muttering

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

This is another clue I need a rest. Outbreaks of pretentious nihilism? See The Doctor immediately.

My soul is running on empty also because our house mates have been away, and so the collective rhythms of prayer and relational tending we have woven together slackened off. We kept our family rhythms, mainly, but getting out of bed early to go to our chapel (a shed at the end of the garden) when it’s just me and my husband didn’t feel as doable. Instead I reconnected with my saucy old flame, the snooze button, and had a torrid but ultimately unnourishing affair.

When I first stepped away from my think tank leadership job and began writing in my own voice for the first time, I said to a dear friend “if I become an instagram spirituality influencer, please shoot me in the head”. So much that passes for wisdom nowadays is ultra-processed, repackaged, depersonalised, the life in it still faintly visible through the rebrand, but rapidly ebbing away. I could conjure up some of that for you, sure, from my empty well. I just really, really don’t want to.

There is an old preacher’s adage about not being able to feed anyone with stale bread. I am no preacher, but all good story tellers and wordsmiths are trying to offer something nourishing. My bread is not stale but it is also not yet ready to be eaten. I have watched my housemates learn how to make really good sourdough and also kombucha, and neither process can be artificially speeded up. They begin with something living from the outside ( a scoby as gross and fascinating as zombie skin, in the case of kombucha, see picture, wild yeast for the sourdough) and then require patience as it ferments. My temptation in these high speed, perma-crisis times is less about offering old words and more refusing to wait for the fermentation and proving process which is so central to wild, free-range (rather than factory- made) wisdom. I need, again, to surrender to the seasons.

The content machine is no respecter of the cycle of the year. The attention economy, which anyone making anything must strike an uneasy bargain with, does not rest. Yes, a lot of us will be taking some downtime, but my doing so here for any length of time will affect my readership stats. It may cause some of you to pull your subscriptions, which help sustain our family life. Go in peace. Even though a life as a writer is financially precarious, if I become a slave to the algorithm, treat this place like a literary LinkedIn I won’t even have half baked bread to offer. I need to get still, and quiet and listen. Listen to the wind in the fields, the birds, the soil, the still small unpanicked voice underneath all this. The life from outside of me. I need to go intentionally seeking joy, and beauty, and bodily pleasures, away from screens. I need to get my roots down deep if I am going to have any fruit (breadfruit? See, even my metaphors are scrambled) to offer.

So I’ll see you in September and pause paid subscriptions in the meantime. Meanwhile, here is a beautiful poem by Rosemary Wahtola Trommer, which

Julie Dunstan

pointed me towards.

For when people ask

I want a word that means

   okay and not okay,

     a word that means

devastated and stunned with joy.

   I want the word that says

     I feel it all, all at once.

The heart is not like a songbird

   singing only one note at a time,

     more like a Tuvan throat singer

able to sing both a drone

   and simultaneously

     two or three harmonics high above it—

a sound, the Tuvans say,

   that gives the impression

     of wind swirling among rocks.

The heart understands the swirl,

   how the churning of opposite feelings

     weaves through us like an insistent breeze,

leads us wordlessly deeper into ourselves,

   blesses us with paradox

     so we might walk more openly

into this world so rife with devastation,

   this world so ripe with joy.

Summer Events

• I’ll be speaking at Midwestuary in Chicago, Illinois, August 22-24th.

• Then in Little Rock, Arkansas, speaking at the public library on August 24th.

I’ll also be coming to Maine, Boston and Notre Dame in South Bend Indiana in October. If you would like to invite me to speak in or near any of those places around then, please do get in touch.