humble beginnings | hopeful future
THAT I WOULD BE FREE
Walking today
This came out on the page this morning. Creativity is medicine, my love. It makes it possible to start again over and over and over and over...
Walking todayI saw a bird in the tree overhead,I heard her first,Belting wildly, naturally,Into her head (or out of her heart).She tipped forward and backOn the branch next to the telephone wireWhich might have felt precarious,Except that, so clearly,She was meant for song and this light.Could you help but love her?Silhouette against the sky,Teaching you to sing with herWhole body, whole life, the momentDawn creeps into the sky?
This came out on the page this morning. Creativity is medicine, my love. It makes it possible to start again over and over and over and over...
Happy Monday!
And please take a look at what starts Wednesday! I'll be taking you through The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron this summer. This book, this activity, this exercise can be life changing! It's about unlocking your creativity and confronting fear and it can be useful for anyone who feels they are living, not for themselves, but for anyone or anything else.
Read more here! The Artist's Way: A Summer of Creativity
Prosperity
The purchase of my house closed on March 9, 2020. The world was shutting down, no toilet paper on store shelves, the streets becoming more and more still on my morning commute. Days before the close, I went to yoga on a Sunday morning at the kundalini studio near my house, and I was the only one who showed up for the class.
Shar, the teacher, guided me through the kriya, and then at the end we spoke about what came up for me. I told her about how lonely I was, going through this house buying process without a partner, as the world was about to enter a similar state of isolation that I was already feeling on the inside.
I had begun a sadhana (which is the yogic word for daily spiritual practice) doing the Subagh (or Sobagh) Kriya. I was not doing it absolutely daily, but I did it several times each week. The Subagh Kriya is for prosperity, and anyone who teaches it will remind you that there are many forms of riches and prosperity. They will direct you to put your mind on what prosperity means to you.
I’ll link to the kriya here so you can see what it is like. The word, “Har,” is chanted repeatedly. Har means, “God as the creative infinity,” and the intention of the mantra is to affirm our ability to co-create with God, or the Universe, or whatever name works for the power that is outside us and bigger than us.
At this point, I'd guess I've spent more than a hundred hours with that kriya, but as I was getting ready to buy my house, I had only been in the practice for a couple of months, imagining the life I wanted to create. Shar was delighted to hear how soon this big piece of my own idea of prosperity appeared after starting that sadhana.
That day, she looked at me with fierce, glittering eyes and said, “You will learn to become very good company for yourself in that space.”
It felt like a prophecy.
The idea of being very good company for myself began to figure into my own definition of prosperity. I had a direction, something to work for that did not require a partner or family nearby. And since that time I have come back to that over and over again.
I learned to be good company for myself during long weeks last summer when R was away with his dad. I learned to create little moments of play and luxury. I learned to go to yoga even when I didn’t feel like it because my body would be thankful and repay me in some small way later.
I learned to feed myself delicious food and put my hands in the soil when I needed a friend. I learned to sit and write long letters to myself on the nights when I could not sleep. I learned to watch TV. I learned to listen for which internal voice was talking, that damn inner critic so often so loud. I learned to take something to help me sleep when I needed it.
I learned to be less afraid of myself, my choices, my desires. I learned to climb to the roof to look at the stars or watch the sunset for no one’s benefit other than my own. I took myself on dates and vacations. I bought myself nice clothes and allowed myself to change them multiple times a day, so I could wear the right costume to the dog park or the grocery store.
I watched over myself and held my own hair back as I leaned over the toilet on nights of horrifically big feelings. I watched myself panic that something inside of me might be irreversibly broken. I reminded myself that the morning comes. It always comes. And I gently put myself to sleep in the dawn light, made myself a cup of coffee when my son awoke or it was time to go to work, after a night too short.
This is prosperity--to become very good company for myself!
Sat nam.
Something good :)
Writing poetry about hard things is easy in a way.
But, what about that whisper from inside that says good things are coming?
The things you've waited for, even silently, as they seemed too big to speak?
They are in motion.
They are nearly here.
All you must do is keeping going.
Keep crossing that bridge.
On the other side, it's still just life, but something sweet is there waiting.
My morning pages are usually a list of my mundane worries, to-do list, things I am mulling over for the 64th time. But today this came out! A strangely auspicious premonition...I guess we'll see!
Still, it reminded me of this from Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things:
"Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.”
I also made my TikTok debut this week with something very important! I look kind of serious--please! know this is concentration--not me thinking I'm a serious dancer.
A new direction
I've been mulling it over and I've decided to take a slightly new direction in this space. You can still expect essays but I'm going to put a little more emphasis on poetry and art and creativity in general. And joy in the midst of life that's always shifting and challenging and sometimes just shitty. Think smaller posts more often. Okay? Okay. I'm stoked. See you soon.
Be.
Rest in cool water. Dance in flame. Lick up morsels lobbed onto my plate. I was born in ease, In the universe,In myself.Hung the world round my neck,Its weight pulling nearer, nearer to the floor.Stop that. Let it clatter on the floorboards.Skip into the mud forest.Find a shelf fungus,Haunt a cardinal tree.Be.
Engage in small c creation
“We do seem to be living in a universe that is in a constant and unending state of creation. It’s never stopping. It’s never stopping here either. We are not witnessing that. We are PART of that. We come from that. We work into that." Elizabeth Gilbert
“We do seem to be living in a universe that is in a constant and unending state of creation. It’s never stopping. It’s never stopping here either. We are not witnessing that. We are PART of that. We come from that. We work into that.
So if the energy of the universe is in constant creation, when you are in creation, yourself, you’re in alignment with it. And that’s why it feels so good, because you’re in the river of the thing that is happening from here to the outer extent of the universe, always. And when you’re not in creativity and when you’re not in creation you’re against that flow and that’s why it feels like depression, and that’s why it feels like despair, and that’s why it feels so heavy.
So for me, the best way that I can feel healthy, which means a sense of belonging, not just belonging to other people, but belonging to this whole weird story that’s happening that we’re in, is if I do creativity “small c" on a small scale. So if I make something, then I’m also creating just the way that the universe is always making something and for some reason that feels deeply good at the soul level. And when I’m not doing that I’m stagnating against a power that wants me to create with it.
So for me it’s profoundly spiritual because there is no greater way to connect with capital C Creation than to engage in small c creation. And that c can be as small as you want. There’s something about making something with your hands that just makes you healthy and I think it’s what we are supposed to be doing so we don’t despair.”
Gwyneth x Elizabeth Gilbert: Can Creating Something Small Heal Something Big?
This is taken from an interview Gweneth Paltrow did with Elizabeth Gilbert on the Goop Podcast. I heard it several weeks ago and I have become enamored with the idea of “small c” creativity. There is so much power in it.
A few months ago I felt inspired to put some of R’s artwork on my kitchen wall. He was in a phase where he loved drawing and I felt inspired by his art. Then I started to add my own art to the wall and the art of some of my friends (some of it made while they were watching R for me). It’s become my visual memorial to small c creativity. Each morning while I’m making breakfast and packing lunches I have several examples of small c energy reminding me that this is where the power lives.
Starting with the small c has helped me to move onto some middle-sized c creative work. I finished this oil pastel drawing while I was Santa Cruz. I just got started with watercolor this weekend (something I have zero experience with). I’ve been knitting too, which feels pretty chill but still adds and element of small c connection to my life.
The piano and my voice continue to be sources of small c. I think of singing along with my car stereo in that context now. Learning to play piano by chords has really freed up the piano to become a small c-type exercise. I can play almost any song and process the emotion of it through the keys and my voice. It’s powerful.
So what’s the benefit of small c? What can you really get out of it besides mediocre art?
The main benefit I see is that I have developed a comfort level with myself. I have come to know myself through small c. I’ve started to hear my inner voice through the writing I do here and in my journal. The inner voice has grown more recognizable as I assuaged the inner critic with a reminder that this doesn’t have to be good. My inner critic told me the leaves of the watercolor plant should be green but my inner voice thought rainbow might be nice.
When I do small c creativity, I start to hear the difference between the two—the inner voice and inner critic. But small c dials back the intensity so a risk becomes less scary.
I use small c in the way I live my life, as I’ve left behind the manual for living that I used to follow. Small c invites curiosity, What if I told the truth? What if I said the hard thing?
What kind of small c are you doing?