The Lesson of Empty Hands

Writing and the alchemy of abundance

Image by Milada Vigerova on Unsplash

“The abundance of the unpredictable in the world tells us the poverty of the calculable fragment of the world.” — Giuseppe Longo

Not half a mile from where I’m sitting now, there is a meadow. Don’t picture anything too pretty; it doesn’t fill with wildflowers. In these weeks of deep winter, it’s covered with snow and there are scooter tracks across it. When you walk there in spring, you’ll hear the larks singing in the air above in all directions. Through the green months, the grass grows long and rough, until it’s cut and baled for feed for the following winter. At the far corner there is a small sewage plant, and depending on the way the wind is blowing, you’ll know this before it’s pointed out.

It was mid-September and I was rounding that corner of the meadow, talking on the phone, when I heard the words come out of my mouth, “I think it’s time to stop talking about climate change,” and realised even as I said this that I would need to explain myself, to give some account of how this could be the case, even if only for me, which is how I came to write the book that became At Work in the Ruins.

In two weeks’ time, it will be a year since the book was published, so I thought I would write a post or two looking back over the journey it took me on. I’ve told the story of the conversation I was having that day and how it set me writing – but what I’ve rarely mentioned is what happened two weeks earlier, how I came to give up on the book I had thought I was writing, and how important that move of giving up turned out to be. Anything worth writing – and this is true of other forms of making – starts with a gift, and to receive the gift, you need empty hands.

When the book came out, friends asked what took me so long, seeing as I’d been insisting that I was writing a book for about thirty years. This came up in one of my favourite events on the book tour, when

Lydia Catterall

and I spent an evening in conversation at Mill Hill Chapel in Leeds.

“I think it took me this long to stop trying to be clever,” I told Lydia, and there’s truth in that answer. Another side of the same truth is that it took me this long to learn to show up with empty hands.

It’s a lesson that’s come back to me, here in the snowy blankness of the early weeks of 2024, so this seems like a good moment to retell the story.

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In the summer of 2019, I’d handed on my responsibilities at Dark Mountain. Ten years was long enough, and there were others ready to carry the project into its second decade. On the masthead of most issues, I was listed as Managing Editor, a title that makes the whole operation sound far more professional than it ever was. None of us worked full-time, and the day-to-day demands fell heavier on others, but my role was to be the catcher-in-the-rye: the person who would drop other commitments, renege on family plans, work crazy hours and teach myself skills I’d never wanted to have, in order to keep the whole thing from going over the cliff, which it would threaten to do two or three times a year in the early going.

If you’ve ever played that kind of role, been the one who keeps a project from derailing, then you know that when it goes well, the consequences are hard to point to: no one notices the disaster that didn’t happen. But given the usual life expectancy of literary journals and cultural projects in general, that Dark Mountain was still around after ten years and in solid enough shape to make it through the departure of its last remaining co-founder is some measure of the work I’d done in those years.

I had a story that those Dark Mountain responsibilities were what stood in the way of my writing. This may or may not have been true, but handing on the responsibilities meant ridding myself of an excuse for the absence of the threatened book. And when I got back to my desk in the late summer of 2019, I wrote as never before. Among the things I wrote that autumn was a series of essays for Bella Caledonia, under the title Notes from Underground, where I set out to explore the deep roots of the new climate movements that had erupted over the previous year. I’d written ten of these essays by the time the pandemic came along, and they had grown from tight 1,500-word explorations of a single idea to great ranging pieces of six times that length.

I stopped because everything stopped, and it didn’t make sense to go on writing as if we were still living in the same timeline, and I didn’t trust the ease with which everyone seemed to be repackaging the stories they had been telling two weeks earlier to fit the sudden shock of the pandemic. But by the time I stopped, I’d already convinced myself that these pieces were building into a book.

So when I hosted the Climate Sessions in the autumn of 2020 with

Martin Shaw

, Alastair McIntosh and Vanessa Andreotti, it was partly with a view to relaunching the project of that book I thought I was writing. I spent the early weeks of 2021 writing and rewriting, trying to find a way back into it, then promised myself I’d have another go after the summer holidays. Only that August, feeling my heart sink as I sat with the same material, hearing a weariness in my voice in conversations with people who had offered me advice, did I get to the point of allowing myself to give up.

If I say that writing a book is hard work, this misses the mark. When it’s working, writing hardly feels like work at all. When it isn’t, I feel useless. But the alchemy of the process is such that, if you have to try and summon up the energy for it, then you’re sunk already. There needs to be something alive on the other end of the line, a source of energy that comes from somewhere else, so that your job becomes to wrestle with this and draw it in and find out what exactly it is.

This alchemy has something to do with the strange relation of scarcity and abundance. It was a logic of scarcity that kept me holding on to ideas that no longer had life in them. For five minutes or half a year, there had been something pulling on the other end of the line, but I was gripping tight to the memory of that, rather than admitting it was gone. And that, I’d say, is a good part of why it took me so long to write a book.

There can’t have been more than two weeks between the afternoon when I fully allowed myself to give up and the morning when I heard those words come out of my mouth as I walked around the far corner of the meadow. A good part of the material from that earlier abandoned book came back and found its way into Part II of the book I ended up writing. But if I hadn’t been willing to let it go altogether, I wouldn’t have got to the place from where I could write it.

I’m telling you this now because I need to remind myself. Two days ago, I found myself staring again at what should have been the draft of the fourth instalment in the Into the Deep series that I started writing last summer. And I had to admit that it’s time to let this go, to leave the series unfinished, rather than holding tight to something that might have worked if I had written it three months ago.

You don’t just learn a lesson once, you get brought back to it. I’ve served the gift that came into my empty hands back in September 2021, as well as I was able. Here in the early weeks of a new year, I’m learning to empty my hands again, not to fall back into habits of holding tightly, but to trust in the mysterious abundance out of which gifts come.

Dark as the times may be, this mystery holds true. May there be gifts ahead for all of us, as this year unfolds.

DH