Voiding

On work and idleness and clay and stones and more and less

Origo at the Barbican in London

On Monday my friend Bhanu and I went to see Origo, an installation by Delcy Morelos at the Barbican. It’s something else.

It’s a big ring of clay, steep and deep as a riverbank. You step inside the hollow wall of the ring. It’s dark, total black to start with, a void. The smells of cinnamon and cloves hit you: wow, who knew. You walk further in. Little slits of sunlight at floor level, turfy bits of roots above. You come out into the middle of the ring, into the sun. Brick pavers, sky, the tops of buildings. There’s nothing else there, another void, this time of glaring sunlight.

But there’s another doorway. You go back in again, back into the dark. It’s a little faster to adjust this time. This darkness is inviting. I wished there were little stools to sit upon and sniff the cinnamon and enjoy the darkness longer.

A big clay ring full of darkness and empty spaces. I loved it. Inspired by ‘ancestral Andean and Amazonian knowledge’, Origo takes its name from the Latin for origin. I could dwell upon the meaning of ancestral knowledge, but Origo didn’t make me think about origins. If anything, the week after our holiday to Germany and Denmark and Sweden, it made me think about destinations. Why we go places, what we do there. What we do anywhere.

This clay, this mud. It was so elemental. What went into its making? Tbh I don’t know what else to say about it. It’s monumental. Behold it. Some things should be seen and not heard or talked about.

Not talking. I’ve not posted on my blog in 2026. I wasn’t sure what I had to say! For various reasons it’s been an odd year. Though maybe every year is an odd year now.

At new year Bhanu told me to make a void. Do nothing. See what arises. A fix for restlessness, a mark for thresholds of life, a different and less rushed way of doing and being.

Initially I understood this to mean just the month of January, but after a passing remark in February it turns out she meant the whole of 2026.

Things did encroach on the nothing. Life does go on, one does have to work.

But there’s other things, and sometimes they’re too much. Social media, news media, podcasts backing up. I love the gardening reels and the animal memes, but they become an infinite scroll, and I’m better off picking up my secateurs or stroking the felty ears of a dog. But: try-hards and time-siphons and sundry other vampires, ‘content creation’ (ugh) on various platforms: that’s what embodied too much for me, and I resisted. Too much grabbing, too much noise. What did I have to add to all that? And what was I grabbing?

Which got existential quite quickly. Did I need to do a Swedish death clean? Or is there such a thing as a midlife Finnish rinse? Or maybe I’m just feeling the residue of my Saturn Return and no longer having patience for certain things (too much noise, etc., see above).

So the Void came easily.

Tbh I don’t need telling to do nothing, because I am really good at doing nothing.

Maybe not as good as my friend Angela, who takes months to write me first-class Alan Bennett-ish letters, and then WhatsApps me to say they are on their way, and then we wait to see what a first-class stamp does nowadays. Usually composed across many months, and often a dozen and once even two dozen pages long, her letters are full of the most exquisite everyday nothingnesses that are of course the true meaning of life: holidays, family news, books read, films seen, dishes made, random opinions, insurance claims for leaky ceilings, the decline of Royal Mail, and the disappearance of Marks and Spencer in Huddersfield. My kind of nothing.

Unless I am reading someone’s manuscript, or reading a book, or watching The Pitt, or pottering in the garden, I’m currently often doing nothing. Though even pottering in the garden is an aimless kind of nothing.

And then there’s the wicked nothingness of being on my phone. I’m even typing this on my phone! As my computer keeps overheating.

Doing nothing can perhaps be framed in other ways. Perhaps we can step out of the context of work, and think about leisure.

Bertrand Russell wrote an essay in praise of idleness. Its resistance of late-stage capitalism’s need for outcomes is a delight. He advocates ‘a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day’. Idealistic! But, he notes: ‘Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen instead to have overwork for some and starvation for others.’

Anyway: back to doing something. On Monday Bhanu drew a card for me from Rachel Pollack’s Shining Tribe Tarot – this was a personal deck Rachel gave to Bhanu when they worked together. A personal deck that was physically MADE by Rachel and TRANSMITTED in the physical world. A deck that thus is MAGIC. Rachel is the greatest writer on Tarot, and her deck is one of the great ones even in its mass-produced form.

The card was the Ace of Stones. I used to want to pull Major cards to see what they have to tell me, but now I love to pull the Aces most of all. Rachel calls them gifts. ‘When Aces appear, miracles are afoot.’

The Stones in Shining Tribe are the Earth cards. The material realm and earthly matters that ground us. What earthly gifts do I enjoy, and share with others? What miracle can I make happen today?

Today, in fact, I went to the dentist and he fixed back a crown that fell out on holiday. In just a few minutes! An earthly gift indeed. I love my dentist. He’s good, and best of all he’s quick. A miracle-worker.

I use Tarot as a lens or a medium – a structure for daily practice and reflection. Its 78 cards give me 78 ways to think about my work, other people’s work, life in general. I know Tarot freaks some people out, but they’ve probably unsubscribed by now, so never mind.

I have to think more about what this Ace of Stones means to me. But it does have an Origo on it! Look, that ring of stone (clay) top left, inviting us into its triangular voids. Also, now I look again I see how delightfully phallic this card is. Rock hard like a stone too. Such things must be noted.

Ace of Stones in the Shining Tribe Tarot

Anyway: the point of this post? I don’t know. I could relate some of this to the Buddhist idea of emptiness, but maybe today I just want to sing the praise of doing nothing. Sometimes I wish I was more outcome-oriented, but sometimes you just have to resist productivity culture and be in the moment. Sometimes you have to step out before stepping in again. Make a pause, sit in the dark, reprioritise.

Also: I have switched out podcasts for audiobooks. That has been a good fix. I never liked talk radio. The chatter! The grift! I’ve been listening to Dickens novels this year instead. Bleak House narrated by Miriam Margoyles is stand-out. I decided to take my time and turn my Dickens year into two, and for variety I’m currently listening to Interview With the Vampire narrated by Dan Bittner. I read it over thirty years ago, and I wanted to see if it’s still one of my favourite novels. It is! Maybe even moreso. I’m truly immersed. It’s such a feat of the imagination. Anne Rice was a genius. I can’t wait for the next season of the tv version to show here.

And: on 2 August there’s my next Tarot For Writers workshop. In Celestial Navigations, we’ll work with the Star, the Moon and the Sun, using the powerful associations of three of the Tarot’s most beautiful cards to direct our own stories.

Before that: on 11 July I’m doing a lecture on Writing With Tarot for members of the Artisan Tarot community.

And: on 8 September Kit de Waal and I are holding a talk on Building Your Own Creative Writing MA. I’m very excited about this. Kit and I are both passionate about empowering writers to find their own way in the worlds of writing and publishing, and in our talk we are going to guide writers to what they need to know about creating their own course of studies and resourcing their own writing practice. More on that later and elsewhere.

Other classes will be scheduled for the autumn. But I’m otherwise doing nothing this weekend. It’s Pride! It’s Fourth of July! Even though we’re in London. I’ll read some of my favourite American writers, watch some American telly.

Actually, I’m about to read some revised manuscript pages from writers I’m mentoring, and from a quick look that looks exciting too. I guess I’ve not been doing nothing at all.

Looking out of Origo

First posted on my blog, 3 July 2026.

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