This last week I’ve been rewriting my client contract.

Fun? Perhaps.

And my daughter has been doing her college applications.

We had a working date on Sunday at a food court where we could get hot chocolate when needed and stay focused on our work. Because if you’re working on a weekend, this is how you do it.

The card this month is Retraction.

The word ‘Retraction’ sometimes gets a bad rap. We associate it with pain or fear, like the reaction we have when we accidentally touch a hot burner. It's also thought of as a disavowal. A negation of something that has come before.

I like to think of Retraction as being in a natural call and response cycle with Expansion. Like breathing in and out, Retraction and Expansion require each other.

Collectively, we’ve all been doing a lot of Expansion recently. In my own life, I’ve been building and envisioning my business and work. My daughter has been building and envisioning her life and work as well. For lots of people, big ideas, brave actions, and forays into the unknown have been happening.

The card Retraction describes that point after expansion where we make things solid. We consolidate our ideas. It’s time to reel it all in and decide on the details. The particulars of what is going to make this thing GO.

This is not always easy. Expansion is fun. What a lovely experience it is to have all those ideas. Getting things small and detailed includes holding some of those shiny, beautiful ideas up to the light and saying "Maybe not now. Maybe not even at all." Choices are made, and it can sometimes feel like a loss.

But there is also a tenderness to the card Retraction. It's time to pull in the tendrils we may have had out in the world, surrender the things we have been giving our energy to consciously or unconsciously, and let ourselves come home.

When we do these things, we clear space around us. We create a place to work through the details without tugs and pulls that take us elsewhere.

The card Retraction is interesting because it embodies two sets of qualities -- one soft and tender; the other focused, practical, and disciplined. That they are often kept apart suggests that somewhere in our psyches we've made an equation between successful work and hard space.

But maybe hard work is held best when it’s held softly. Maybe focus is not a driven force but one that arises when we come home, when we are still and small and simple.

When we get down to business sometimes the spaces that support us are not the ones that feel or look like work. They may simply be the ones that soften us or give us space.

When my daughter and I park ourselves at a food court booth for four hours with hot chocolate, we are creating a place where we can pull in from the world and our responsibility to it, even though we are out in the middle of it.

When we focus our energy on creating small objects with big impacts, such as college applications and client contracts, this too is an example of Retraction.

This New Moon cycle is a time of Retraction for all of us. Even though getting there can feel like sorting grains of sand, Retraction offers us the opportunity to sink into the solidity of our choices. There is a simplicity here. A realness. Relaxing into this process allows a spaciousness even in the density of details. Between the details, there is space to breathe.