It’s Windy Enough to Fly a Broom or to Break It in Two

I came back from Brisbane earlier this week, after attending to a family health crisis — caring for my father, and navigating the fraught patterns that surface whenever family collides with expectation. Those intersections can feel like tripwires. On the drive home, sitting in the back seat, I had a moment of near-collapse. Panic: uh-oh, this feels like ego death. My chest tightened. I wanted to leap from the car.

But if spiritual practice and meditation can’t hold us in moments of rupture, then what are they for? A crisis must also be a crisis-tunity.

Now I am navigating life with the language of AuDHD, perimenopause, medication — alongside being a multi-dimensional artist caught in the corporate net of teaching. It is overwhelming. Six or seven unfinished projects hover around me. I sit at the desk, but I don’t open them. Part of me fears discovering they are not enough, that I’ve romanticised them into grandeur. Self-sabotage, in slow motion.

So I whisper to myself: ten minutes of music today. Just ten.

Day one of my period brings its own hormone void, but still I rode my bike, still I trained, still I lifted weights. And yet, back at home, my projects only stare back at me — paintbrushes, camera, typewriter, guitar. Terrifying in their silence.

My partner read for me with his tarot deck. Four of Swords. Rest and recuperation. I bristled: but I do rest. And then came the question: what is rest, truly? Scrolling through the endless output of others, I feel small, disappointed in myself. Nobody wants to hear about four half-born books — they want the finished spine on the shelf. Yet the creative process is messy, out of sync, threaded through fractured timelines.

Last night, amidst nightmares, a black bear appeared. I sponsor Moon Bears — they’re close to my heart. This bear was practicing yoga with an enormous greyhound, Willow, my beloved dog, long gone but forever returning in dreams. That vision was not the nightmare. It was beauty, it was jouissance — the pulse of life at the threshold where the strange becomes luminous.

I move between these timelines: dream-conversations with neighbours about witchcraft, resilience, intuition, kindness. They nourish me. Yet sometimes I feel like I am nothing without my creative output. That ache of insufficiency.

But perhaps this is the paradigm I am meant to sit inside: not rushing, not forcing, but leaning into rest, waiting for the moment when the broom does not break but flies.