coffee off the clock is a weekly column full of musings on life since i left my 9-5, and building a life around writing. join me for a coffee every week and follow my journey!

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i’ll go get you coffee, the words we love to hear on a rainy sunday morning. majd delivered me a little vanilla latte before he headed off to work this morning. i sat watching a new york vlog with a blanket traipsed over me and the comfort of a tall lamp in the corner.

bee’s little head was tucked under my chin and i knew there was nothing i needed to do today. dishes from last night’s dinner had been done. living room had been cleaned. present ailsa was in a state of gratitude for past ailsa. i was in need of nothing and nothing was in need of me.

i’ve had quite a soft week, reader. at the beginning of the week, i hadn’t slept very much and was feeling out of sorts. mild headaches coming and going. strange nausea after eating. but then, a tiredness and a strange apathy toward everything i usually love: reading books, writing, walking washed over me. and while i could pinpoint and remedy the physical symptoms, the mental ones weren’t alleviated through multi-vitamins and better eating. instead, i let it come, and i let it go. and it did go.

i just know if it were a little over a year ago, i would’ve scrambled for answers and driven myself mad. am i losing myself?what is wrong with me? have i lost my spark? but it’s taken me time to realise i’m not machine, but human. and my energy goes in cycles.

it has, thankfully, now become second nature to me to resist resisting. and what i mean by that is to stop swimming upstream against the current. to stop treating very natural states of being as problems to be solved. and just to ask myself: “what is this trying to tell me?”. out of nothing, usually comes everything. and we need vast space in between things or else they cease to be any thing at all. there’d be no contrast. no light without the dark.

and from the wellspring of ideas, up comes another. just like my novel, just like my mirror project, just like themes for my writing classes, something inside me says ‘this’. they used to be one at a time, now they interrupt my life spontaneously when i’m making the bed or out on a walk. and i panic thinking: how am i supposed to do them all? and then something reminds me that, yes ailsa, you can do it all. just not all at once. there’s an overwhelming sense of calm as i remember that there’s no deadline. there’s no rush. yes, i can do it all. just not all at once.

now my most recent ‘this’ is probably the most odd out of all ideas that have sprung from that well. though, i was baffled by the mirror one. and if you thought i was mad before, just wait until you hear this. it’s at the intersection of many deep interests in my life: music, creativity, esoterica and jungian depth psychology.

drum roll, reader…i’m currently deep in the research process of an essay about led zeppelin & the creative unconscious, using their fourth album as a case study. depending on who you are, this will either sound painfully boring or incredibly fascinating. and maybe a secret third way of “ailsa you’ve lost the plot” to which i’d be glad to inform you that i’ve never really had it.

and the thing about my ideas is they care for neither. if i feel compelled to do something creatively, it has to be done. and i am but the humble medium for whatever these spontaneous ideas want to exist through. who am i to refuse?

whether you think stairway to heaven is overrated or not, it’s one of my favourite songs of all time, particularly for plant’s lyricism: when all are one and one is all. to be a rock and not to roll. plant has a real knack for mythic storytelling.

after months of having dreams about ‘threes’. triangles. three people. three places. i immersed myself into jung’s theories around numerology and the importance of it in our psyches. and i remembered in his book man and his symbols, he was particularly interested in the quaternity. a number and symbol of completion. wholeness. integration. and who else were fascinated by this number? led zeppelin.

4 band members, each represented by 4 of their own chosen symbols. 4th album. their song 4 sticks on the album. any tarot enthusiast will know the significance of the 4 of wands. or the 4 symbols on each corner of the world card and the wheel of fortune. not only that, but when i laid my eyes on the album cover, the oil painting is unmistakably similar to the 10 of wands tarot card. then, on the inside sleeve is the exact rider-waite-smith depiction of the hermit. and this is just the tip of my little esoteric iceberg. let’s not get started on jimmy page’s fascination with crowley, though i plan on touching on that in the essay.

i began drawing so many parallels between things i’d learned throughout my year or so of studying jung and the making and production of led zeppelin’s fourth album. and though a little voice in me was like: who actually cares about the symbolism behind something that was made 55 years ago?!, ailsa’s little voice went: me, i do. and that was enough. so wish me luck as i swirl down the dizzy rabbit hole and make meaning out of something peculiar.

was i the girl in english class who thought the curtains weren’t just blue, and there was actually some deeper meaning? yes. that was me. and even more so as i get older and further into depth psychology, because i’m sure that whether we are conscious of it or not, we are constantly in an unconscious dialogue with a deeper current that runs beneath us. and up from it springs all sorts of creativity, ideas, words, phrases, colours, numbers and symbols.

we have lost our symbolic literacy, our nature that is naturally geared toward meaning-making and take everything soooo painstakingly literal! that does not mean that i’m void of all rational thinking and have succumb to whimsical delulu. i just think when you reject either and identify too heavily with one side (thinking or feeling, rational or mystical), you lose your balance. yin and yang and all that.

so anyway, reader, whether you think the curtains are just blue or like me, you sense a deeper undercurrent, i still hope that you’ll read my essay once i stitch it all together on a board like a detective. it’s nice to know that my journalistic instinct is still alive and kicking. told you that this essay feels like it’s at the intersection of all my weird and wonky interests!

until next week reader, may all your coffees be interrupted by a spontaneous idea that you don’t dismiss, no matter how weird! ☕️✨

– ailsa x