The Layover
What my North Node, deep work, and a recent layover had me consider about fallow periods.
I had been having one of those days where everything I’d built felt somehow further out of reach. Just the exhaustion of someone who has been doing real, sustained work and found herself, mid-afternoon, still looking for evidence that it was adding up to something. I’d been bringing the Landed Method™ into the world for a while now. Watching it land in people and seeing the changes it made. And still, on this particular afternoon, I was searching for something outside myself to make me feel that it was going to be okay.
I went back to my astrology.
This wasn’t random. Uranus had just shifted into Gemini for the first time in 84 years, since 1941, and the astrology world was paying attention. The last time Uranus moved through Gemini, the world was mid-war and mid-transformation, aviation was rewriting what was possible, and the pace of everything was accelerating past what anyone had prepared for. There was a feeling in the air that things are moving. Cycles are completing and beginning. Which made me want to look at my own chart with fresh eyes, to see what I might have been too busy to notice.
I’d read something recently about working with your North and South Nodes and realised I didn’t actually know what they were. So I looked, and I was quite surprised with what I learnt.
The South Node in astrology is the pattern you carry: your default, your comfort zone, the groove worn so smooth you move along it without noticing you’re moving at all. Mine is in Virgo. The sign of analysis, of perfectionism, of over-functioning and criticism and doing. When life gets uncertain or still, I go into action mode. I fix things, refine things and produce things. I move. It feels like competence. It feels like safety. It has also built a significant portion of what I’m proud of, which makes it harder to see as the limitation it also is.
The North Node is the growth edge, the direction your soul is being pulled toward, usually the thing that makes you most uncomfortable, usually the thing you’ve spent the longest time resisting. Mine is in Pisces. Trust. Surrender. Following the irrational nudge. Being in the flow rather than constructing a channel for it and forcing the water through. The Pisces North Node sits in my second house, which ties it directly to self-worth: the work I’m here to do, in this lifetime, in this body - is to learn that I am valuable not because of what I produce, but because of who I am.
That one hit like a tonne of bricks.
The onslaught of bricks got me thinking about my business, Landed and The Landed Method™. The framework I’d spent years developing to help people navigate uncertainty, make decisions, and take action, is built almost entirely from my South Node energy. That recognition didn’t undermine what I’d built. We all need tools for motion, for direction, for moving through confusion toward clarity. That is real and necessary in my opinion. But as I looked at it honestly, I could see the gap. The method was a map, and maps are made for people who need to find their way somewhere. What I hadn’t yet named was what you do when you’re in a phase that doesn’t have a destination.
I’d written before about what I called the Season of In-Between, the stretch when one chapter closes and another one begins. I’d recognised it in my clients, who arrive there and almost always feel the same pull: do something, find something, manufacture momentum, make the in-between stop feeling like in-between. What I could see now was the exact mechanism driving that pull. The South Node in Virgo doesn’t wait to be invited. The moment things get still, it steps in with a solution: a new project, a new plan, a new reason to be busy. It has served me well. But it is also how you end up leaving a phase before it has finished telling you what it knows.
There was no tool in my own framework for this. And yet it was one of the most common places both me and my clients found themselves.
I went, as I often do when I need perspective I can’t generate alone, to Amelia Earhart. She has been my spirit guide in this work for as long as I can remember, a woman who knew navigation from the inside, who understood what it was to trust your instruments and your instincts in equal measure across unknown terrain. I asked her: ‘what do you do when the work is done and there is nowhere yet to go?’
The answer that came back was not a navigation answer. I considered that the fallow period is not a navigating problem, it’s a weather problem.
For the first time, the in-between had a shape I could understand. Because weather is not a failure of navigation. Weather is not something you solve. You shelter from it, dress for it, let it pass, and you do not mistake being caught in it for being off course - it is what it is, and it asks you to surrender.
The metaphor that followed was brilliant: The Layover.
We had 24 hours in Hong Kong on the way back from Japan, and we’d arrived already tired. Kowloon was there, and I did have a few places I wanted to revisit. The last time I’d been in Hong Kong I was four years old. There were parts of the city still living in me from that first visit, half-remembered and not quite locatable on any map, and I felt a real need to find them. But we were also, honestly, just exhausted. Neither of us felt much like doing anything deliberate at all.
Still, there was that pull - a whisper at the back of my mind: ‘Lucy, you're here. You should be making something of this. Make a memory worth keeping’. So we made one stop, then let the day be what it was. A coffee somewhere in Kowloon. Wandering without a destination. That strange suspended feeling of being mid-journey - neither quite here nor there - sitting in a remarkable city with the honest admission that I had nothing left to give it.
That feeling was what I’d been trying to name.
Here is what you actually do in a layover, and what I think we forget when we’re in one: you don’t tear up the boarding pass. You don’t stand at an empty gate trying to will a plane into existence. (Although, I do vaguely remember actually trying this once in a desperate attempt to get home). You don’t rebook the entire trip because this stop wasn’t on the original itinerary. You find a seat. You get a coffee. You let the time do what time does. And you can rest inside it rather than fight it, because it has a name, a shape, and a known protocol. A layover is a legitimate stop on a route that is still going somewhere. You just can’t see the gate yet.
This is what I now refer to as The Layover within the Landed Method™. Something distinct from the pillars and the phases and the Compass. The space between full cycles, the place you land when the work of one chapter is complete and the next is not yet clear. It is its own territory, with its own signals and its own way of being moved through. And it is one of the most destabilising places I watch people arrive at, precisely because we have no language for it.
What I know about high achievers (and I know this from the inside) is that rest in the abstract is nearly impossible to receive. "Give yourself permission to rest" lands flat because it offers you nothing to do with the doing-nothing. It sounds right and goes nowhere. What high achievers actually need is a container. A name. Something that reframes the in-between from a problem requiring a solution into a recognised phase with its own protocol and its own alchemy. Because when you know you’re in a layover, you stop treating the wait as evidence of being behind. You stop checking your watch against an arrival time that hasn’t been posted. You stop manufacturing urgency, that South Node speciality of mine, as a way to make the not-knowing feel more like knowing. You do what you actually do in airports: you ravish the time. You let yourself be exactly where you are.
The fallow period, received this way, stops being a void you need to fill and becomes something you can actually inhabit. Your next knowing is not somewhere ahead of you, waiting to be found. It is forming here, in the in-between, in exactly the place you keep trying to leave before it has finished.
The gate will be announced. You don’t need to find it before it exists.
If this landed somewhere in you:
Where right now are you manufacturing urgency because stillness feels like falling behind? What would you do differently if you trusted this was a layover and not a detour?
When you complete something significant, do you let yourself actually land in it, or do you immediately reach for the next thing? What does that cost you?
What might already be forming in the not-doing, if you stopped long enough to let it?
What would it mean for your sense of self-worth if your value had nothing to do with how much you were producing?
Until next time,
XO Lucy
I love this layover analogy!!