Lena Tichy

Tag: wayfinding

  • the snail’s deserted house

    the snail’s deserted house

    There’s a persistent idea that astrology can be used to predict the future. But astrology is stranger than that, weirder: in my calmer moments, it comes alive in my hands not as a crystal ball but as a living, breathing system of wisdom. Like I can put headphones on and listen to the universe doing its terrible, magnificent unfolding.

    And so, when I think about a current or upcoming planetary transit, I ask myself what unfolds, what calls, and how we might answer. The month of March has a loud, impatient sound to it. There’s an intensity and urgency in the air, a feeling of things ‘not being right’, and a desire and an inability to fix them, especially when it comes to our relationships, values, body image and communication. It’s all quite in-your-face. And in some ways I think this coming month gives us a chance to practice for the years ahead. Because this sense of urgency and doom within us – and in the world at large – will not go away. How could it?

    My question at this point is how do we live inside that. What calls us underneath the chaos, the blinking red light, the fear? I think it might be slowness. The slowness I mean is related to being uncertain, to taking our sweet time with an answer, to resting, to saying no, to saying ‘not yet’, to honouring the hours of our precious lives, to embracing our age, our frail bodies. To stop for a minute. To expand the minute like a rubber band. To go beyond the tyranny of clocks.

    There’s a kind of slowness that’s packaged and sold to us as ‘relaxation’, ‘leisure’ or ‘self care’. It’s function is to keep us functioning. But for whom? Instead, in the kinds of crisis times we live in, slowness can be a powerful portal for new visions of justice. Three mystics who have been saying this for decades are performance artist-prophet Tricia Hersey and her Nap Ministry, the late Reverend Barbara Holmes from the Center for Action & Contemplation and poet-philosopher Bayo Akomolafe. It’s no accident that three of the wisest and fiercest advocates for slowing down are Black; all of them, in their unique ways, draw a connection between the oppressive, violent systems we inhabit and our collective inability – or refusal – to slow down. In her book ‘Race and the Cosmos’, Barbara Holmes writes: ‘I agree that the social situation is urgent, but frantic responses to resilient problems will not solve anything.’

    It’s a shame because I used to really love my frantic responses. They felt like I was ‘doing something’ while slowing down just felt like ‘giving up’. Bayo Akomolafe has me reconsidering this:

    ‘To ‘slow down’ … seems like the wrong thing to do when there’s fire on the mountain. But here’s the point: in ‘hurrying up’ all the time, we often lose sight of the abundance of resources that might help us meet today’s most challenging crises. We rush through the same patterns we are used to. Of course, there isn’t a single way to respond to a crisis; there is no universally correct way. However, the call to slow down works to bring us face to face with the invisible, the hidden, the unremarked, the yet-to-be-resolved…. It is about staying in the places that are haunted.’

    Slowing down is often seen as a cowardly move, a passive position, but Bakomolafe shows us there can be an edge in slowing down. It takes courage. Because when we risk slowness, we start seeing and feeling what we’ve previously ignored. Slowing down, he says, is about ‘questioning our questions’. In this way, slowing down becomes not the opposite of urgency but a deeper, more radical form of it.

    I admit, I’m no good with slowness. I’ve spent the better part of this month trying to go slower, as though I was waiting for permission, and the permission never came. I felt as though I needed to ‘prepare’ for slowness, to be in a certain state of mind, figure out my entire life first and clear my inbox and forgive everyone who ever hurt me. That sort of thing. But when I really think about the slow moments of February, none of them are grand, and all of them are, in their own way, majestic. Running my tired fingers along a snail’s deserted house. Standing at the window late in the day and watching the subtle change of the light. Entering the present, full of grief, without a single ‘solution’ or ‘plan’ in sight. Letting it be. Letting the needle move, inch by inch, from control to faith.

    Sources

    The above quote is from Bayo Akomolafe’s timely essay ‘A Slower Urgency’. All the other writing on his website is wonderful too.

    ‘Race and the Cosmos’(CAC Publishing, 2020) by Rev Dr. Barbara Holmes is a a great book. So are her most recent thoughts on ‘Crisis Contemplation’.

    Slowness and Rest are not the same but related. Tricia Hersey’s work and her book ‘Rest is Resistance’ (Aster, 2022) illuminates grind culture’s links to chattel slavery and argues for rest as a radical portal for revolution and resistance for everyone.

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

  • a coat that fits

    a coat that fits

    You could say we live in dangerous, revolutionary times, and I’d agree. I’m an astrologer and a writer; I see meaning in the movements of the planets and try to find language for what I see.

    Ever since dwarf planet Pluto moved into Aquarius last November, but even more so in recent weeks, I started to think about power again. My own and other people’s. The power of a collective. The way that the word itself is so slippery and, at least in my mind, inspires caution: damp fingertips hovering near a wall socket. A river, fat with fresh rain, tearing through the landscape. Power has an untameable core, which begs the question: what place do we give it in our lives? What shape? The death-dealing faces of power are all around us. But what does life-giving power look like? A power that is self-directed but not self-interested? A power tuned to liberation instead of oppression?

    As I thought about this, I pulled J. Ruth Gendler’s The Book of Qualities down from the shelf. It came out over forty years ago but you wouldn’t know it. In that one slim book, Gendler poetically describes 84 different emotional experiences such as Doubt, Trust or Ecstasy. Here’s her entry on Power:

    ‘Power made me a coat. For a long time I kept it in the back of my closet. I didn’t like to wear it much, but I always took good care of it. When I first started wearing it again, it smelled like mothballs. As I wore it more, it started fitting better, and stopped smelling like mothballs.

    I was afraid if I wore the coat too much someone would want to take it or else I would accidentally leave it in the dojo dressing room. But it has my name on the label now, and it doesn’t really fit anyone else. When people ask me where I found such a becoming garment, I tell them about the tailor, Power, who knows how to make coats that you grow into. First, you must find the courage to approach him and ask him to make your coat. Then, you must find the patience inside yourself to wear the coat until it fits.’

    What strikes me about Gendler’s vision of personal power is the subtlety: The tailor’s coat is a gift. You cannot buy it. It’s a piece of power but not the whole, raw thing. It’s as much as you can safely handle and the shape is as individual as your fingerprint (‘it has my name on the label now’). Whether your power is deeply quiet or loud and fierce doesn’t matter. It’s yours.

    I first read those words about ten years ago, in my late twenties. I had not yet found the courage to approach the tailor. But I thought that, perhaps, if I found a way to avoid any further grand mistakes in my life, I’d finally qualify for a coat and wear it proudly. It wasn’t so. I turned thirty, then thirty-five, I made more mistakes, I failed and I fucked up and Power made me a coat, despite all my flaws. And I started wearing it, awkwardly. I started to claim my power, awkwardly. It was confusing at first: I had spent so many years trying, and failing, to ‘be better’, to control things and engineer perfection because I thought that would give me access to my power.

    But as my coat started to settle on my shoulders it slowly hit me that power, the kind you have to grow into, is not about control at all. It is about being rooted in a fluid, bright place within yourself. From that place you can face reality, which is the one thing that will bring each and every one of us to our knees. But we can rise in it, too.

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