What is Hummingbird Ritual?

a stack of index cards or, the long answer

Like so many other liars, strivers, Virgos and anxious people, I set out to write a book the spring of our pandemic innocence. A baking book! A book about hospitality! Everything was broken and anything seemed possible. My mother had died. My husband was enduring chemo. My prospects been squashed and scattered. We had no money. The garden lay fallow but for weeds and sporadic clumps of seeded parsley and lemongrass. The yard too, was overgrown. The streets were quiet. The house was strange and new to us. Too tall boxes of our packed belongings sulked in corners. All the furniture that wasn’t moving with us had been sold or donated. The couch. The kitchen table. Our steps echoed in unexpected places. We were ghosts. I was unmoored. It was the perfect time to write a book about cake.

It was during that spring and summer when I actually had the time to commit to a routine. I knew that this was the first thing a writer needed. I had always, in fact,  been on a quest for a kind of efficiency, for a code that would fast forward my development. I had long been low-key obsessed with the idea of The Routine as a signal of high personal attainment and was excited to finally be getting one. In the past, I had hungrily scanned articles with titles like “The Morning Routines of the Five Most Productive People in the World” and “The End of Day Routine That Will Change Your Life” for clues. Routines were tried on, found to be bulky, itchy, unsustainable, or simply inconvenient and promptly pulled off like ill-fitting sweaters and tossed onto the dressing room floor.  I had shelves of forgotten bullet journals and discarded copies of Getting Things Done and Atomic Habits. Dark cabinet corners  full of half-taken vitamins and adaptogen powders and giant Costco canisters of oats because I read that someone important ate the same thing for breakfast day in and out to save time and brainpower.

They key I found, to getting a routine to stick is that it can’t be hindered by work, errands, or social obligations of any kind. This is what mine looked like that spring of loss: I would wake up without alarm when my body and mind had rested long enough. I ate what my body told me to (strangely, this was often oats).  Then I read. For hours. Broadly and driven by pleasure and curiosity like a voracious hummingbird darting from flower to flower. When my eyes tired, I stared out the living room window, sun on face and sometimes tear on cheek. I was barely even daydreaming. A small voice would say: “you don’t have to be doing anything. Just sitting here is enough.” After yoga and meditation I wrote. Sometimes I took a walk and then wrote. We ate simply, watched movies or Community reruns, and then got in bed and read some more. In having this rare and luxurious space to simply be, to notice, and to get intimate with my grief, I did end up finding the touchstones of daily rhythm that now keep me grounded. My “routine” was birthed from circumstances I wouldn’t wish on anyone but truly, we should all have—while housed and safe—such periodic sabbaticals from self-expectation and over-employment.

My husband, a more regular writer than me had lent me his copy of A Writer’s Time by Kenneth Atchity which described a version of the index card method I had seen Michaela Coel’s character use in I May Destroy You. The book’s tone was a bit familiar for my liking, but I appreciated Atchity’s insistence on following interests not “shoulds” and on scheduling “vacations” from the project. It was simple, clear, practical advice and it got me moving. After all, even the most hopeless perfectionist can capture a single thought or idea on an index card.

Turns out I love capturing ideas. While deadlines urged a few fully-formed essays, articles and blog posts out of me, the index cards really took over! Recording “resonances” became the point. Open-ended exploration. I’m certain if I looked back I’d find that Atchity had made experience-informed suggestions regarding the best ratio of card number to book length, but my own collection of cards grew in thick, broad-ranging stacks. They helped me locate myself. My source material was aggressively interdisciplinary, relational and impressionistic. It included cookbooks, Black theory and thought (Lorde, McKittrick, Baldwin, hooks, Hartman), guided meditations, vintage photographs, ecocriticism, philosophy, death and food studies, my own nature walks. By the time I stopped “writing,” I had hundreds.

We moved across the entirety of the country’s thickness with all our stuff shoved into two ill-coordinated PODS. I re-entered The System. Got “busy” again. I noticed with exasperation that many of the doors that had seemed to crack open, revealing other ways of being and shared opportunities began to close again as we collectively rushed, inexplicably, to get back to normal. My  grief, which initially had left me breathless, bereft, and untethered (and therefore also strangely diaphanous and care-free)  had moved into my chest and feet. Sedimented like bad milk. Anxious, thin and watery on the surface. Grey and sludgy below.

The index cards have survived the journey-across the country and through the sludge. I’ve started adding to them again. The stacks are not a book and I’ve decided that’s okay. They are a cabinet of curiosity, a record of sadnesses and delights, an archive of wonder, the contents of an interdisciplinary recipe box. And anyway, my compulsion for goal setting has changed as I have. I’m shifting all my eggs to other baskets. I’m gently, self-consciously laying them down with process and vulnerability. I’m releasing the grasping attachment to a magic bullet, a “better” me, or a shiny, finished product. Instead, I’m finding contentment in noticing the magic already there. Discovery, curiosity, and unfolding. Ritual over routine.

With this newsletter, I’m pulling the index cards one at a time out of the vintage recipe boxes where I store them and just kind of sitting for a bit with the ideas that still resonate. It’s an exercise in joy and grief. A kind of excavation? A re-framing in light of my doula work? A practicing of hope? All of the above. I don’t know what it will look like, but that is what this newsletter is.

Thank you for reading.