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In Identity, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth, Relationships, Speaking, Writing

A Dormant Season

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

In my workshops at teachers’ conferences, libraries and for writers, I often speak about building in a dormant season for creativity and rest. A period of time where we are intentional about doing nothing, so we can replenish our spent energies and allow our creative impulses to regenerate.

This sounds wonderful in theory, but I realised recently how difficult I find a dormant season in practice. When I’m writing a new manuscript, I try to maintain a steady rhythm, where I work for a little bit each day so I don’t get too far away from the characters and the story. But sometimes dormancy is forced upon us, due to vacations or the needs of others or health concerns or simply life being life, and interrupting us from our best-laid plans.

This happened to me in August. And I struggled against it. I find it frustrating that even when I’m teaching about certain skills and strategies, like taking a dormant season, I can still be ridiculously slow to recognise it in my own existence. We had a couple of trips planned, and then an unplanned trip to the island late in the month to help our kids move into their first basement suite off campus for the upcoming university year, and by early September I recognised how far away I felt from the novel I was writing.

I wish I could say that I was calm about this. But I wasn’t. I got pissed off, at myself for not progressing on my book when I had planned to write all summer, and then irritated by my family members who kept me from writing. I didn’t enjoy how this resentment made me feel, but I stewed in it for more than a week before suddenly remembering what I tell others: for a dormant season to be effective, we have to surrender to it. To enjoy our lives without feeling guilty that we aren’t working on a creative project.

I had completely missed this part of the process. So I reached for my journal, and reflected on this season of dormancy I’d been in, and why I felt myself longing to get back into the writing of my murder mystery novel. I remembered my Ruby Finch Books tagline: Intuitive Courage. Somewhere along the line, I had once again lost myself and my sense of identity and purpose. I’d been at the mercy of circumstances and other people and life itself without recognising or claiming my own agency.

It felt so good to realise that I can always choose my response. I could be angry about not writing, or I could acknowledge that I had been in a period of creative dormancy, which meant that a new burst of creative energy could bloom in me if I allowed it to. In the four seasons of nature, winter is the dormant season. It’s followed by spring, the explosion of growth and vitality, but we only get the beauty of spring because the trees have been dormant in the winter.

I truly believe that the same seasons are necessary in our own lives. And sure enough, once I stopped having a temper tantrum about my writing rhythms and progress being disrupted for a month, I began to feel the slow, gathering momentum of fresh insight for my book. I would lay in bed at night, ready to drop off to sleep, and my intuition would connect one storyline with another in a way I hadn’t considered before. I would realise something in one of my character’s backstories that informed their current choices and motivations.

Writers live for those moments of insight. I suppose I’ll never know if I would’ve had them anyway, if I’d been writing during August and into early September, but they came to me so insistently and yet gently when I wasn’t writing, so I have to hope the brief dormant season made a difference. Now I’m back into the story, writing nearly every day, and the work has a fresh energy behind it.

I’m working with a new counsellor this month, and one of our goals is to help me identify these patterns in my life faster. I don’t like to feel lost and annoyed for weeks on end when I could simply choose a better response. Believing that a dormant season will help my creativity flourish is a healthier choice to make than stewing in frustration about being unproductive.

What are some ways you’ve seen a dormant season lead to fresh insights and replenished energy in your life?

In Books, Culture, Identity, Nurture, Personal Growth, Politics, Spiritual Life, Writing

Morality Still Matters

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

Lately, scrolling through the news makes me so depressed that one question keeps floating up through my subconscious into my feverish mind: Does morality still matter? Is it important to care about what’s right and what’s wrong when so few people in positions of power (or their supporters) no longer seem to give a shit?

To find an answer, I turned to Omar El Akkad’s newest book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. He’s a brilliant writer, and I adore his novels, so I knew his thoughts on the ongoing hellish nightmare that is the oppression of the Palestinian people in Gaza would help me unlock the deer-in-the-headlights feeling I’ve had about this monstrosity.

Not only did Omar El Akkad help me to better understand the nuances, he stirred up within my soul a twinned grief and rage that I’ve been trying to subdue, but find that these feelings have now been unleashed. And along with them I feel a blanket of shame, that I waited so long to engage my compassion and find the courage to use my voice.

In El Akkad’s book, he makes the point so much better than I could that morality still matters. That the performative noise we make in the west as liberals so we can feel like good people while doing nothing practical that could cost us personally or professionally is not only useless, it’s damaging to our souls and does real damage to people on the other side of the world.

In One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This Omar El Akkad writes “The moral component of history, the most necessary component, is simply a single question, asked over and over again: when it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power? What makes moments such as this one so dangerous, so clarifying, is that one way or another everyone is forced to answer.”

If we can’t care about starving children shot while trying to get scraps of food, then our moral compass is broken. My moral compass has been broken, because I was afraid to access my compassion. To speak up when it might be politically unpopular to do so. To tell myself that the issues were too complex for me to understand. But a live-streamed genocide that I choose to ignore so I don’t have to get involved is not complicated. It’s simple cowardice.

When writing about how western liberals try to have it both ways, by feeling like moral human beings while doing nothing to stop these atrocities, El Akkad asks, “How does one finish the sentence: It is unfortunate that tens of thousands of children are dead, but…”

I finally know how to finish that sentence. It’s well past time for action. To recognise and state aloud that my morality is meaningless when it might cost me something so I do nothing to help. Each one of us must draw a line and say we side with justice or with power. We cannot do both. The people of Gaza, like the people of Ukraine, need our help. If you are like me and you read novels about acts of courage during World War II, then we are well past our moment to step up and say, “no more.”

I don’t know exactly what this means for me, or for you, or for any of us. But I know that looking away is not an option. Choosing not to care because it hurts is cowardly. All of that apathy turns us away from ourselves, from our souls, from our shared humanity. We have to care about starving children like they were our beloved children. Because they are.

I don’t want war. I want peace. But I also want justice for those who are oppressed and starved and beaten and murdered because of politics and power. If I believe morality still matters, then this matters. Even when it costs me something, I have to be willing to act. To not stay silent. To do my part, whatever that part is, to stop this evil and to engage all of my grief, rage, and shame for taking so long and turning away so callously.

I’ll leave you with two quotes. The first is from Angela Davis, who writes “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.” And the second is from Omar El Akkad’s must-read book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This: “How can you hope for anything to change if you won’t participate in the work of changing it? How can you have any moral standing if you are so susceptible to abandoning hope?”

In Identity, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth, Relationships

Care But Don’t Carry

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

I’ve had a hard time this summer with my nineteen-year-old son coming and going every seven days for his job. He’s been driving a huge truck in a copper mine, working twelve-hour shifts that alternate between days and nights, seven days on and then seven off, with a seven-hour drive each week to get there and to come back home.

It’s been a challenging time for him. The learning curve was steep to manage the trucks and the driving routes. It’s a remote location. He’s working with seasoned veterans who have been doing this job a long time. It’s a radically different world for William from his university student life and his previous employment as a barista at Starbucks.

On the plus side, his two best friends from high school are working with him. They travel together, live together when in the Cariboo region of BC, and faced the same stress when training on the trucks. And they are all making very good money to pay for their upcoming tuition and living costs as students.

When I was talking to friends about William’s experience this summer, and my frustration with listening to him complain about how hard the job is and how he misses being at home, I found myself saying, “The job for me here is to care but don’t carry.”

I liked that phrase so much I wrote it down in my journal. I’ve been mulling it over, considering how it applies to parenting and marriage and family members and friendship and lots of other relationships. I realised I know how to care and I also know how to carry stress for other people. But I don’t know how to do one and not the other.

I found myself trying to gently explain this to William. I said, “You are nineteen now. When you were younger, I would help you with your anxiety by sharing it with you. We would talk, and you would discharge some of those feelings onto me, and then you felt better. But now you are an adult. You’ve taken on a hard job, and I’m proud of you, but you get paid a lot of money for this work because it’s hard. And you’ll have to learn to manage some of that stress on your own without complaining about it to me.”

There’s no switch to flick to turn our kids into adults. I know it’s a long process, filled with ups and downs. But I also know that I don’t want to be weighed down by stress that isn’t mine any longer. I want to offer support and love when people around me are struggling, but I don’t want to carry their load for them because it doesn’t belong to me.

I’ve been exchanging voice notes with a friend who has kids the same age as mine. We’re both trying to navigate our way through the rhythm disruptions of having young adult kids leave home, then return, and then leave again. It’s a stage of parenting that won’t last forever, so we are both trying to enjoy the kids when we still have them living here, but it also requires a fresh commitment to our own self-care and nurture to manage the sense of whiplash with all the coming and going.

Care but don’t carry. I’m living into this phrase. I want my kids and my husband and my friends and family members to know I can be counted on for help and a listening ear. But I also want to free myself from the pressure I can feel to carry burdens for others that I haven’t actually incurred for myself.

What are some ways you’ve practiced care but don’t carry in your life and relationships?

In Identity, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth, Relationships

It’s Never About the Cat Food

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

Jason had a long and busy season of work travel this spring, where he was away from home for nearly a full month. In between one of these week-long work trips, he flew home for three days before leaving again. On the Friday he was home, I said, “I could use your help refilling this bag of cat food from the huge bag upstairs as it’s easier to pour it with two people than for me to scoop it on my own.”

He said, “No problem,” but by Sunday night, the small bag still hadn’t been refilled. We were in the kitchen, getting ready to go upstairs to bed, and I sighed. “I guess I’ll be filling that bag of cat food on my own, because it’s the end of the weekend and you’ll be flying out again tomorrow.”

He went upstairs. I was a few minutes behind him, as I saw a text from my daughter that I wanted to respond to. While I was answering a couple of her questions on my phone, I could hear the noisy sounds of Jason scooping out dry kibble from one bag into another. By the time I climbed the stairs, I saw that he had placed the refilled bag onto my pillow.

I was mad. So was he. And this fight wasn’t about the cat food. It’s never about the cat food.

If you’ve been married for a long time, nearly three decades in our case, you begin to recognise the trigger points that exist between you. When I stated that I’d be filling the bag of cat food on my own, he heard it as an attack on him. He was stressed, and tired, and what could’ve been a calm discussion between us quickly escalated into a war.

The next day, as I drove him to the airport, I found myself crying. I told him that he hurt my feelings with the way he refilled the bag and left it on my pillow. He said that I had been passive aggressive with my tone, and that I didn’t ask him directly to do the job.

I realised that when I said I’d be doing the job on my own, what I was really saying was that I wish he didn’t have to leave again. That I felt raw and vulnerable, offering support to my kids and to him and longing for some of that support to come back to me. I want to be able to rely on my husband for help, as we are in a new phase of a long relationship where I’m improving at receiving care from him and he’s improving at giving more emotional nurture to me.

He cannot be expected to get all of that from, “I guess I’ll be filling that bag of cat food on my own.” But sometimes we say that instead of the really true thing, because what I felt was so much bigger and harder to admit. Telling someone we rely on them and we will miss them is a tender thing to say out loud, especially when I used to be skilled at pretending to be fine all the time, even when I was actually lonely and sad and lost.

He listened to me pour out my heart on that drive to the airport, and he apologised. He still had to get on a plane and leave for a week, but I felt lighter knowing that I hadn’t abandoned myself during this argument. I took the time to ask myself what was really going on here, and felt curious about why I was so sad and wounded by his actions.

I feel like I’m in a new phase of growth right now, where I’m committed to advocating for myself, even when I feel pressured to return to old, familiar, comfortable patterns in my relationships. I didn’t use to ask for help. I wore my ability to “do it all” as a badge of honour, while privately nursing my growing resentments toward my loved ones. I don’t want to do that anymore.

This new way is vulnerable. It requires me to admit that I need other people, and it means I’m responsible to initiate the hard conversation when I’ve been hurt. But now, Jason and I have discovered a new shorthand to represent the old relationship patterns compared to the healthier ones we are creating: It’s never about the cat food.

In Identity, Minimalism, Nurture, Personal Growth, Relationships, Speaking, Writing

Awakening to Meaning

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

For a few months now, I’ve been ruminating on meaning and purpose. I began thinking that I needed to create a deeper sense of meaning in my life, so I brainstormed possible avenues: volunteering for a hospice society, applying for a new part-time job, taking a class, learning a hobby, making new friends.

I did a few of these things, even going so far as to schedule an interview for a remote admin position working twenty hours a week. As the interview drew near, I started to panic about where I would find those additional twenty hours a week with my current schedule. By the time the interview happened, and the therapist I spoke to about the job said, “You don’t want an admin job, you are too overqualified for this and you are already doing such interesting work!” I had essentially come to the same realisation.

It’s funny how meaning functions. If I hadn’t applied for that job, and scheduled the interview a couple of weeks after the application, it might have gone differently. But in the interim, I slowed down enough to notice my day-to-day life, and it was like an old polaroid photo developing in front of my eyes. The meaning was already there, baked into everything, but I wasn’t tuned in to recognise it.

It’s been an extraordinary time, waking up to the meaning and purpose that’s all around me. I thought about friends I already have that I haven’t seen for ages, and I sent a bunch of texts to set up some plans. Being open to making new friends is lovely, and I hope that happens as well, but I have so many friends from decades back that I could be investing time and nurture and care in.

I feel like my nerve endings are awake now. So much of what I think will fulfil me doesn’t live outside of me. It’s within. The job is to get quiet, to slow down and pay attention. As part of this awakening to meaning, I recognised how much I loathe Instagram. I only created an account on there for Ruby Finch Books so I could see what my daughter posted, but that’s not enough of a reason to have an account that only gave me a feeling of stress. So I deleted it.

I started to look at my work with a fresh pair of eyes. I love my company, about to celebrate its second birthday on June 7, 2025, and I love the vision that I had when I formed it. When I checked in on my online book sales recently, I saw that five paperback copies of Post Civ sold in the UK last month. I have no idea how anyone in Britain knows about my climate novel, but I’m thrilled. I got a report saying that the Las Vegas Library bought an ebook of Post Civ for their patrons. For someone who used to receive royalty cheques in the amount of .09 for online book sales, this news made me smile from ear to ear.

My monthly podcast Intuitive Courage is small but growing. People are listening in Canada, the US, Germany, Sweden, Ireland, New Zealand and other countries. I have no idea who they are or why they’ve chosen to listen to me, but it’s an honour and a privilege. There’s meaning baked right into those stats. And it gives me a fresh jolt of purpose every month when I consider what to talk about in the podcast. It helps me boost my own confidence as I work through these ideas in real time in front of a microphone. I feel the same joy when I work with teachers and writers at conferences, libraries, and in my online classes.

The idea here is that meaning is everywhere—in our work, our big dreams, our key relationships, our friendships, our unique connection to our own inner life and intuition. It’s all there. The key is to notice and appreciate it. To reflect on why it offers a sense of purpose to us. I’m practicing feeling happy in my life as it is, right now in this exact moment, instead of longing for some other place and time where I might eventually be happy.

Recently I changed my tagline from Author, Educator, Nurturer to Author, Innovator, Nurturer. I’ve been innovating my whole life, and I’ve decided to own it as part of my identity. My first author bio in 2010 said, “I’m fully awake and happily original.” It’s taken me a little while to live completely into those words, but I’m doing it now, and it’s so satisfying to awaken to the meaning that’s all around me.