“Leap Days are for leaping,” I wrote in 2016, when posting my inaugural blog, a personal challenge to write an essay a week (almost) for one solid year, starting on Feb 29, 2016 in efforts to determine two things: 1) whether I could develop the discipline for writing; and 2) whether anything I had to say might resonate. I had no idea how much it would give me, or how creatively expansive and fertile those 4 years would be. My kids were all still very small and so active then, and my life was segmented into 27,000 different pieces between chasing them, my consulting work, teaching yoga, staying involved with family, friends and community – and writing.  I picture my life then like a cotton candy machine, spinning at a speed that can’t even be seen while the spun candy threads magically appear like webbing within the chaos.  Maybe because of the chaos.

The four years following, from Leap Day 2020 – on the very eve of the world exploding and my world collapsing and then it all slowly coming back online – to today, might be described in opposite terms.  The cotton candy machine abruptly stopped and all of us gone to ground – first all the activities stripped away with COVID, then my identities too through the personal implosion. Fallout, solo walks, therapy, tears, loneliness, multiple moves, and ultimately a new spin started, with all the hope and sugar that a new momentum brings. 

It’s interesting to me that these Leap year periods (can we call them Leaptiles?) coincide so deftly with chapters in my life, and not just the past two Leaptiles, but I can go back 4 years and 4 years and 4 years and 4 years and could chapter title them all with what they meant to me, with very little blurriness or exception or resistance.  Maybe it’s my own weirdness that those four-year intervals seem to so neatly segment themselves in what otherwise feels like an oblong blur. It’s certainly not true for individual years –  I can feel almost violent with rebellion when New Year’s rolls around and with it the cultural expectation to reflect and forecast. But perhaps four years is just enough space …. Or maybe my astrologist friend Rachel has an answer.   

Do any of you feel the same way on Leap Day about your Leaptiles*? (*is it catching on yet?)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what the super-real theologian Kate Bowler has said and written about how we don’t really experience time in a linear or a progressive way. She talks about how we actually feel time in different ways and at different speeds that then color how we see ourselves and our place in the order of things. She describes the three major ways we experience time as Tragic Time (time slowed down and bubbled around you after Something Big has happened, and everything is in too bright, hyper-crystalline focus), Ordinary Time (the kids’ school lunches, the work emails, health care open enrollment, the oil change) and Apocalyptic Time (the experienced-in-community feeling of time we have around things like the pandemic or climate change or wars or justice). Bowler, who herself bounced among Times when she was diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer in her thirties, says that each of them are precious and insightful, but none of them are places where we can live forever without missing something.   By “something,” I think she means something essential about ourselves and the world we are currently occupying, what our energies are allowing us to open to, what we are being asked to respond to. Stay too long in Ordinary Time and we never awake to the fleeting beauty of an individual winter sunset. Stay too long in Tragic Time and we become too encased and brittle in our own glass to hear each other.

I’ve been chafing a little lately at the boundary of this Time I’m in, here at this new Leap Day. I move through the routines of what has now ebbed from Apocolyptic time to Tragic Time to Ordinary Time, with a good bit of ping ponging back and forth between the latter two, as is normal – and between the daily routines of work and children, I feel a little discomfited somewhere at the margins of bed-kitchen-car-desk-couch. On the Tragic Time side of the net, I’ve learned a lot in the past four years about how to remain as equanimous as possible with what is happening, about Acceptance and limits of my control, about living with Uncertainty.  And there’s a true peace from these learnings that creates space and hope for a renewed momentum.  One the Ordinary Time side of the net, I’ve gotten a lot of shit done.  I’ve weathered some massive storms (with a face to illustrate) and anchored myself and my children in new lives, while hanging on to all our beloved roots, and bouncing over new waves.  Most of the time, I’m worn-the-fuck-out from the effort, but I’m also proud too, because it’s given us the stability and fertile ground to start a new spin.  One that incorporates all of where we’ve been, but with many doors opening onto possible new opportunities.  The volley between these two Times, in particular, continues on the micro every day, as it does for us all, and so long as I can gather up the capacity to bring awareness to it, I can right-size my energy to where I am. This helps.

And yet.  At the dawn of this new Leaptile (I’ve now fully coined it, y’all) I think I’m feeling this bit of discomfit because I’m playing a tiny bit too much Woodoku late at night instead of paying attention to this faint call I’m starting to hear. I think I’m being asked to shift my energies and respond to something new in these next four years. Most likely, it’s something small, like to really figure out a good under eye moisturizer without consulting the internet and then being aggressively targeted by ads (personal recommendations most welcome!) But maybe it’s something a little less vapid, or not even new – like remembering more of who I am a level far more essential and foundational than the weather patterns of these past four years.  And I won’t know unless I listen and I open to it.  I’ve come to know this opening isn’t a one-time action, but a decision to make over and over, each morning. Or as often as I can remember to, with grace given for all the times I can’t. 

Some Leap Days are for leaping. Others for hunkering. Other still for listening and opening.  I hope whatever yours is asking of you for your next four years, you are receiving like a same-day Amazon Prime. 

My heart is reaching out to fervently wish a healthy, restorative and happy Leaptile for us all!