New: Snail-like

shells and the season of slow and no

I’ve written about the Georgia spring with awe and wonder before (see here and here).  And wouldn’t you know, here again come the Smelly Bradfords, the forsythia, the redbud and the wisteria with their cotton whites, yellows, mauves and purples. Here again come “the first little wave of migrants” fresh from holiday, to add their chirps and warbles to an ever-intensifying dawn chorus. Here again come the spotted salamander eggs and the delicate series of ephemerals. Lovely stuff all.  But sometimes, and it is like that this year, Georgia spring  can really grate on my nerves. It’s just so goddamn outcome focused. It’s so loud. And all the surging. The churning. The stuttering earnestness of everything’s effort to burst forth into more life! It’s all Disney bunnies and bluebirds out here and maybe Amy Adams is hiding behind a pink magnolia mentally rehearsing her song and dance number.

I want to say ok, already. Hush. Slow down. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I want to say hey! Less production, more process! I want to say “it’s not you, it’s me. I’m the one who’s not ready. March’s erraticism and gusty mood swings are in tension with my desire to stay curled away in my own winter shell until the thick heat of the summer sun steadies the air and tamps down unpredictability with its heavy weight. Spring can leave a body feeling exposed, vulnerable, harried.

Some of this is expected with the season. The shift from winter to spring can feel jarring for many of us. I wonder though, how much of my own outlook has to do with the ways the false urgencies of capitalist production and unchecked growth condition even how I experience spring: surface! Growth at all costs! Goal-orientation! Deadlines! KPIs and bottom lines!

Everybody has a substack at this point and many of us use them to show ourselves how we are thinking or feeling in the hopes of being able to do these things with more clarity or intention. I also share the questions I generate here for connection, in the hopes that they resonate with you. In the hopes that they gently guide both you and me as we learn to hospice the aspects of this over-grand, gasping supremecist system that have lodged within our own being. Sometimes, I imagine them as journal prompts that support easeful but intentional movement through change or as invitations to pay attention. Often, I’m just curious about how you are doing (and how I am doing) and want to engage you in a bit of meaningful exchange.

Such was the case with my last post when I asked how you were experiencing the transition into Spring. And How’s your energy? Your appetite? Are you needing to adapt any of your rituals or habits? 

***

I love a Wisconsin artist friend, Sara, for many reasons. She’s a talented and thoughtful maker. I love the ways she practices vulnerability and lets the seams of her creative process show. I love her willingness to engage in these exchanges with me! In response to the questions above, she commented on the ways the “fits and starts” of spring are hard on a body and how she is doing more consistent body scans. She noted that she is grounding this Spring by “being more ‘snail-like.” I had been thinking about my own shift to spring in relation to slowness and shells have been showing up for me lately as messages related to boundaries, refuge, and strategic withdrawal, so this phrase really resonated. I had a hunch she might help me think better about being snail-like as a strategy for managing the tensions and discomforts of change, transition, or simply the pressures all around to hurry up already.

 When I  asked Sara to expand on what she meant she shared:

I adopted a Slow and No policy to allow myself to feel if a decision, action, opportunity or idea was right. All of this has meant I have increased the capacity for feeling and holding emotions in my body. With increased capacity I feel more pain and loss but because I'm moving at my own pace I have time to sit with these feelings without judgement or trying to move on to dull these senses. Being snail-like allows me to befriend my body and move through the world with sustained intention.

This hits for me. Both of my parents died in springtime, a year apart. It is my grieving season. This is why I know that this time of year, frothy and bright on the surface, carries loss and grief in its icy undertow. That March wind threatens to blow us, unsteady and unpracticed, from the nest. Shooting up too eagerly or early leaves us vulnerable to the frosty night.  Slowing down is capacity-building. Being snail-like encourages us to stay close to the ground. It helps us re-member the still, dark effort of composting that holds our tender shoots steady. The snail “nourishes itself on green plants and decaying vegetable matter [italics mine].” Surely in part because of these twin appetites, “the snail decrees that life moves forward, even in the smallest urges and imperceptible movements of time.”¹

Being snail-like means tempering desire-fueled doing and the optimism of bright plans with a steady discipline around process. It means staying in right relationship with our own inner timing and needs. Snails shelter “themselves in leaves, crevices or underground during the day and [emerge] at night, early morning or when there is dew or rain. This elicits our projections of the retiring nature that shuns the light, but also of something vital and hidden.”² Being snail-like recovers a fuller, more nuanced understanding of spring that includes shadow, loss, soil and death. Including these elements restores a sense of unhurried wonder for all the raucous, sparkly renewal their (vital and hidden) processes support. When we are snail-like, we move, as Sara suggests, with sustained intention. We can grant ourselves permission to be in no hurry to move in a straight line from one stage into the next. We might consider that what’s actually urgent is that we slow the fuck down. We might emerge, retreat, re-emerge and repeat. We might simply insist on staying slow.

When Spring (or any fitful transition) makes me grumpy and disregulated I know I have to listen to my body, take cues from nature, and look for themes as clues. Shells.

Madeleines

Sadly, my baking lately has been infrequent and hurried, yet another line item to cram onto and cross off the to-do list. But when I do it right, and with care, baking is expansive, opening up and slowing down time. A good bake grounds, regulates my nervous system and pulls me back into body. Limbs coordinate and the kitchen is a dance space. There is no bake worth eating if process is not revered absolutely.

Maybe as a kind of push back against the ways a work week insinuates itself in time “off,” or maybe to ease the anger-fueled grief set off by the latest flurry of executive orders, or simply as a way to ground through the erratic shifts of the season, I’ve been feeling the need for a good, expansive bake tugging at the tail of my business-casual blouse.

When I added a madeleine pan to my Christmas wishlist, I had been inspired by the scalloped beauty of the pan itself as well as the Francophilic iconicity of the shell-shaped tea cakes baked in them. I had been reading Benji Ebuehi’s I’ll Bring Dessert with a mad hunger and longing, taking deep pleasure in the clean photography foregrounding beautifully manicured brown hands holding stoneware platters stacked high with cloud-like merengues or chocolatey layers. Her sage and white chocolate madeleines found a craggy nook in my brain and lodged themselves. I would bake beauties like these. I received not one but two pans at Christmas and you know, because I’m harried, I simply stuffed them into the baking closet and kept moving.

Now, finally, that spring or the weight of work or just the desire to make something beautiful has spurred me to action, I’ve pulled them out. I’m thinking less about stoneware, manicures and aesthetic ideals and more about the practical and direct linkages between tea time, slowness and sanity. 

The Bake

The bake itself served as a gentle return to process. Madeleines are simple to prepare but require attention: to techniques like gentle folding of dry into wet so as not to deflate the tiny air bubbles on which a fluffy, tender genoise texture depends. To temperature (melted butter, warm not hot; eggs thoroughly room temperature). And to the tips accumulated over decades of experience and experimentation  (if not centuries in the case of this storied tea cake). 

For this initial attempt at baking madeleines, I turned to Dorie Greenspan’s Lemon madeleines in Baking Chez Moi. She features a “traditional” recipe and several variations in Baking: From My Home to Yours, but the honey-scented, lightly glazed version seemed perfect for spring. Her tip, passed down from another pastry chef, supports the healthy formation of the quintessetial bosse, or bump on the topside of the cake: “Bake the chilled batter in a cold pan on a very hot baking sheet.” Chilled batter? We already know that process and patience are in play. Every recipe confirms: the batter must be chilled at least a couple of hours in the mixing bowl and then another hour at least in the shelled pans themselves. I moved through each step thoroughly, mindful and unhurried. I welcomed the pauses. My bosse bumped. My glaze glossed.

Clearly the key to successful passage through March’s erratic and windy tunnels is to refuse to be hurried –to sprout, to bloom, leap from nest, produce, respond or anything else. Refusal is a political strategy we all need to be building muscle in right now and slowing down always gums up the capitalist works that would have us forgetting to even breathe (See Robin DG Kelley, see Tricia Hersey, see Kōhei Satō.).

The Ritual

I tend to eat lunch at my desk and eschew formal breaks and I am usually hungry, grumpy, deathly tired or some combination by 3:00 or so. It’s clockwork and it’s why an afternoon tea break for a cuppa and a little something sweet is an unspoken ritual in so many places around the globe. Tea is an invitation to slow down. The sugar is secondary.

The madeleine days, when my body sent its first late afternoon signal that it craved slowness, I listened. I put desktop on sleep, nuked water for tea and unpackaged my little shell cakes.  I skip the usual multitasking and scrolling. I body scan! Lowering and pulling back shoulders, I unclench my butt and re-activate my core, I straighten my spine, I breathe deeply and taste lemon, butter, and honey. After a couple of days, the madeleines are perfect for a quick dunk in the tea. Unlike Proust, I was interested not in time travel (either ahead or back to childhood) but in staying put and being present. There’s process orientation encoded in the tender crumb.

Sometimes I think of ritual as swiping a bright lime-green highlighter across a state of being that’s important enough to remember and practice. Slowness is one such state for me. Presence is another.

***

The Saturday following madeleine week, I sat down at my desk to drink my morning coffee, willing my breath to deepen, allowing myself space to be unhurried. This time without the looming glare of the office clock. I stare out the window. Almost as soon as I cue stillness the tears well. There’s been so much loss this spring already. Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, little birds snatched out of their nests simply for naming genocide. Lifesaving funds frozen in the darkness of night. Public memory and record threatened. Ground lost. And this body of mine has been in motion all week. Always springing forward to the next task. 

The honoring of loss requires presence. Grief needs stillness. It will not abide waiting it’s turn on a To Do list. This is the season of Slow and No. I look out the window again, this time focusing on the giant poplar it frames.  Its branches are sprouting tulip-shaped leaflets in the most achingly tender shade of green you can imagine.

1. The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images, Taschen

2. Ibid