Lena Tichy

Author: Lena Tichy

  • night-time navigation

    night-time navigation

    For a few months now, I have practiced being lost, both metaphorically and literally. I have practiced being in-between-things, I have practiced waiting for signs, I have practiced not knowing what is next. I gave up a job, I finished a book and I made space for something else to enter my life. Whatever it is, the something else has not yet arrived.

    The bridge between an old life and a new life is the present. Or, as a card in my living room reminds me daily: ‘You are not lost, you are here’. In my better moments, I wonder if what I’m practicing right now might serve me in the years to come. 

    For over a month now, the poem ‘We grow accustomed to the Dark’ by Emily Dickinson has been on my mind. And yes, it’s a little on the nose to write about darkness only days after one the biggest power outages in Europe’s history but here we are. In the first two stanzas, Dickinson describes a person walking home from a neighbor’s house in the pitch-black night, trying to see the road ahead. Slowly, the eyes get used to the absence of light. All good, then? Almost, Dickinson says. This is how the poem continues:

    And so of larger—Darknesses—
    Those Evenings of the Brain—
    When not a Moon disclose a sign—
    Or Star—come out—within—

    The Bravest—grope a little—
    And sometimes hit a Tree
    Directly in the Forehead—
    But as they learn to see—

    Either the Darkness alters—
    Or something in the sight
    Adjusts itself to Midnight—
    And Life steps almost straight.

    Walking home alone in the dark, the wanderer has space and time to contemplate larger ‘Darknesses’. Everything unsolved, unanswered and uncertain suddenly keeps her company. I have felt like that more times than I can count. But what comforts me about Dickinson’s poem is the way I can read it as an instruction manual for ‘Those Evenings of the Brain’. It’s okay to move forward when you can’t see a thing, Dickinson says. It’s okay to stretch out your hands and be clumsy. If you move, you will ‘sometimes hit a Tree’ but remember that your bruises are not mistakes; they are evidence of bravery, of having tried. As you rub your sore forehead, take comfort in knowing that you ‘learn to see’.

    The Darkness of this poem is not the darkness of depression, nor the darkness of death. If anything, this Darkness has the texture of black velvet: it’s not a threat. We can be okay in its company, Dickinson says, though she puts it far more beautifully in the poem’s final line. And in one cheeky move she also reminds us that, for all our bruises and our learning and our night-time navigating, we were never in control: it is ‘Life’ stepping almost straight. All this time, as we walked through the dark, we were in relationship with a force far larger than us. Invisible, almost, to our daytime sight.

    This is an essay from my newsletter The Star Container, first published in April 2025. Subscribe or head to the archive here.

  • the practice of self-trust

    the practice of self-trust

    About twelve years ago, when I was going through a difficult time, I had dinner with a good friend. I don’t know why,’ my friend said, ‘but I think you should meet my colleague M. She does these meditation evenings at her house. It could be your thing.’

    I texted M. and started going to her meditation evenings once a month. For the first five or six times, I wasn’t sure it was my thing – there was no big neon sign saying YES, DO IT when I took the train to her house – but I went anyway. I always felt calm afterwards.

    We sat on pillows on the floor in a small room in M’s flat. If there were more than five of us, our knees touched. We always sat in a circle; a candle burning in the middle. After the meditation, M. often invited us to practice other things as well. Once, we did an exercise where we held the hands of the person next to us and were instructed to tell that person everything we saw before our inner eye. ‘It doesn’t need to make sense,’ M. reminded us. ‘Just try and find words for what comes up.’ That evening, the person whose hands I held grew emotional when I told her what I saw. ‘You are perfectly describing what I feel, Lena. Thank you.’ But how?, I wondered.

    Another time, M. gave us crayons and paper and told us to imagine our future and draw the first image that appeared in our minds. I produced a wonky sketch of a house bordering on an ocean, with mountains rising behind it. I will live there, I thought, and immediately wondered where the thought had come from. I had no such plans! But three years later, without me ‘planning it’ at all, I moved from Switzerland to New Zealand and lived in a house by the ocean with mountains rising behind it. That exercise, and hindsight, taught me that intuition is funny and magical and not always useful in the present. But it’s not useless, either.

    “Red Path, St. Prex” by Alexei von Jawlensky, painted in 1915 (Public Domain)

    One evening, in summer, two people canceled at the last minute and I was the only one who showed up at M’s place. ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ she said. I was glad to be outside; I had been feeling sad and stuck for months. I just couldn’t figure out what to do with my life and I punished myself for it. I told M. as much. There was a stretch of forest behind her house. The grass was high and the last light of the day was golden. We walked for a while without talking. Then she stopped, her chin slightly up. I followed her gaze and saw a squirrel in a tree. ‘Is that squirrel telling you something?’ she asked. No one in my life had ever asked me such a question. But I had been in the meditation group long enough to remember that I wasn’t supposed to give ‘the right answer’, I could simply wait for whatever came up. I never felt silly in M. presence.

    ‘I think perhaps the squirrel is telling me to let go a little. To relax. But that –’

    ‘It doesn’t need to make sense,’ M. said.

    And we walked on, all the way back home.

    I’ve been wanting to write about self-trust for a while and never found the words. Then I started wondering about my teachers and M.’s face appeared, her thick head of hair, her glowing brown eyes. It took me years to understand her lessons, to let them become a part of me. She helped me come to my senses. She gently insisted that I take my intuition seriously, that I practice and stumble and return to this terrain far beyond where things make sense. There’s a path there. ‘It is made by walking’, as the Spanish poet Antonio Machado wrote. M. also taught me, in her own strange way, to love my mistakes and let them become part of my self-trust. Our entire life is a practice of having to make decisions about things we know so little about. I expect I’ll still get things ‘wrong’ in the days before my death. But that doesn’t mean I don’t trust my intuition.

    I listen to all kinds of animals now, squirrels included, and I listen to trees and rivers too. When I feel a small whisper inside to go somewhere or talk to someone, I do it. Not always immediately. Often, the whisper will ‘follow’ me around for weeks, even months, before I finally give in. The practice of trusting myself is ongoing. I’m slowly learning that my ‘self’ is woven into everything around me, that my life is dependent on each tree, river and squirrel who crosses my path. No earth, air or water? No self. I guess my self-trust is only as good as the trust I put into all that I’m sharing this earth with.

    So, if a bird, cat, fox or squirrel happens to cross your path, why not ask them if they have a message for you? Why not ask the flowering fruit trees in your backyard, too?

    In other words, why not trust and see what happens?

    This is an essay from my newsletter The Star Container, first published in April 2025. Subscribe or head to the archive here.

  • singing in the dark

    singing in the dark

    March is closing out, how are you? Rattled, tired, or generally okay? No matter the emotional temperature, the skies gave us one more gift yesterday: A Partial Solar Eclipse in the sign of Aries, visible in the Northern Hemisphere.

    Eclipses used to be feared in ancient times: they were seen as a bad omen. It’s understandable our ancestors would think this, given that watching a Solar Eclipse can rob you of your eyesight and life on earth depends on the light of the sun (and the moon, of course). If we lose this light, even for just a couple of minutes, in the middle of the day, things start to feel very strange.

    For over a century now, citizen scientists have studied the behavior of animals, especially birds, during Eclipses. They found that, although a certain silence descends over nature during a Solar Eclipse, the Sparrow, Goldfinch and Thrush keep on singing as the moon travels before the sun and starts to block its light. Even at totality, birdsong continues. There are also other species, such as Swifts or red-winged Blackbirds who, instead of singing, completely abandon whatever foraging mission they were on and return to their nests. Over and over, this kind of behavior has been described as ‘confused’.

    But nature rarely is. Every time we pronounce some animal or plant behavior confused or strange, we end up finding a few decades later that the strangeness was underpinned by more-than-human wisdom and intelligence. We’re just playing catch-up.

    When the sun is eclipsed, the birds are singing in the dark. Perhaps they do it because the sudden darkness feels like the hour before dawn. Perhaps they have a wiser reason than that. But they sing. And if they don’t sing, they return to their nests, close their bird-eyes and huddle. Perhaps they do it because the darkness feels like the night. Perhaps, perhaps. We also know most of these birds will experience a Solar Eclipse only once in their brief lives, unlike humans. That must be strange.

    So, what about us? I think both huddling in whatever nest you have made for yourself or breaking out in song are great things to do during an Eclipse. The days surrounding a Lunar and Solar Eclipse are powerful, often bordering on overwhelming. Instead of a regular Full Moon and New Moon, March gave us a Lunar Eclipse in Virgo on the 13th and this Aries Solar Eclipse on the 29th. The next time we’ll get a pair of Eclipses like that is September 2025.

    Eclipses are a good time for doing a little less of everything and really trusting your gut. And although this newsletter seems one day late, I maintain this advice, including the huddling and singing, can easily be taken into the new week and the first days of April. If you feel like it, maybe you also want to look back. What started to appear in your life around the 20th of April 2023?

    This was the date of the first Solar Eclipse in Aries, lighting up a new place in our individual birth charts. For the last two years, several Eclipses have worked this terrain in our psyche and our lives, until yesterday, when the final Solar Eclipse in Aries closed out the cycle (and the month of March!). We won’t have another eclipse in Aries until 2032, which explains why astrologers make such a big deal of these things.

    So, here are some Aries Eclipse questions:

    How have you learned to honour your individuality and your own freedom since April 2023? Has someone or something entered your life and acted as a teacher on this front?

    Where in your life have you become more courageous, asking for forgiveness (if needed!) rather than permission?

    What have the last one-and a half years taught you about trusting your first impulses?

    This might be in your one-on-one relationships, your public roles, your work, with your family, your health, your own mind or your creative work and self-expression.

    The sun’s and moon’s light will continue to disappear on us, in regular intervals. And we need not fear it. Instead, we can use these moments to illuminate the progress we made, the ways we changed and grew. How we fought for what’s good and reached for what we yearned.

    This is an essay from my newsletter The Star Container, first published in March 2025. Subscribe or head to the archive here.