Drawing the Energy Down

On stepping away and "creative conservation"

I am anonymous amidst the artifacts of the season.

Alone in my favorite meadow, I find that the plants I studied in high summer are now skeletal, desiccated. Here at the end of the year, the potency has been funneled out of their flowering tops, down down into dark roots. There is a sense of turning away, going inward. Life lived below the surface. And yet, despite the withdrawal, there is still so much color—vegetal, vestigial—animating the landscape, a reminder of what was and will be again: frosty lilacs and burgundies, charcoal blues and silvers, and the sour yellow of grass letting itself go. 

In this season of my life, I have also been turning away. I just announced that after three and a half years, I’m closing my Patreon at the end of this month. It’s a bittersweet decision, but it feels like the right time for me; the platform has served its purpose. I launched it in August 2020, in those disorienting early months of the pandemic, when I had just put out a record (The Caretaker) with no hopes of touring it. I craved connection and some semblance of financial stability. Patreon has been a nourishing and encouraging space for me, and I’ve loved the informality of it, the dismantling of distance between artist and listener. It’s been an honor to receive the support and belief of that beautiful community—a belief that has given me a strong foundation from which I can continue to grow. There is perhaps no greater gift than to say to someone, and truly mean it: “I believe in you.”

But now I feel it’s time to move on. To draw my energy down. Between caring for a baby, preparing to release my sixth full-length album, and working (slowly, slowly) on writing a book, I don’t have any expendable energy these days. I have to conserve. And I am curious to see what new ideas will arise when I make space for them. 

But there’s an old fear that erupts from the vacancy. An unwanted, opportunistic fear that crops up like a noxious weed in a freshly tilled plot. It is the fear of becoming invisible, irrelevant, forgotten. The inwardness I crave, the space I seek, can so easily look—to my insecure self—like giving up. Like a defeat. Am I really going to close down a community I’ve spent years building? Isn’t the goal to create, not deconstruct? And at a time when I’m already afraid that motherhood has taken me out of the game, am I really going to isolate myself further?

It’s the same way I feel when I don’t post on social media for a while. Moment to moment, I love being offline, fully engaged in the present and better able to prioritize what matters in my “one wild and precious life.” But there is an undercurrent of anxiety bubbling away, swampy and hot, capable of sucking me in if I don’t watch my step. I worry that in turning away, I’m being left behind. My ego gets tender: what if no one cares about me or my work when I choose to return?

The trouble is, making work we care about requires that we go offline, go underground, take the sugars out of the bright flowers and feed the farthest reaches of our roots. Conserve: as in, take the fruits of our experiences and stick them in a jar in the dark, to make something that will sustain us in the future. There’s no other way to do it, I’ve found.

I feel this pull every December, as we crest into a new year: the urge to disappear from view—not in a hermit’s begrudging retreat, but with the consideration of goldenrod, the thoughtfulness of thistle. I want to withdraw so that I can emerge again with more energy and ideas, with more to give.

Stepping away from the world takes courage. It takes a belief in ourselves. There might be no outside validation in that silence. We might not encounter another soul in that place of removal, only the mirror of ourselves, a hall of mirrors, reflecting endlessly, as we chase the specter of inspiration. But it is a necessary vow we take to protect that windless place inside us, where everything is so still, we can hear the truth. It is creative conservation, I think, as I stride down the lovingly maintained trails at the nature preserve.

In the meadow, the light today is a painter’s dream. It is Inness light: low clouds making the sky a marbled gray, with the sun’s rays pushing from behind like hands against a boulder. Both gentle and forceful, heavy and luminous. It bears the weight and beauty of a hymn.

I don’t meet another soul on my walk, but it’s an anonymity I don’t mind. Because I don’t feel truly invisible—I feel witnessed by milkweed and multiflora rose. And I, in turn, am witnessing them, in all their seasonal shifts and transformations. We give each other space to change. We know that it is only temporary: the breaking down, the crumbling, the retreat, the hush. From that place of potent quiet, we will reach for the sun once more.