The world needs people like you more than ever before.
It needs the writers, the artists, the makers, the dreamers, the envisioners. It needs your words, your voice, your active imagination.
It needs your you-ness.
To go on making art, to go on raising your voice and writing your words amidst all the noise and chaos, you will need to take extra special and tender care of yourself.
Here are three suggestions for ways that you can do that:
1. Feel your body supported by the earth
Take a deep breath. Feel your feet on the floor, your body supported by the chair. Feel the temperature of the air on your skin. Sense into the movements that your body makes as you move through time and space.
You might want to close your eyes and imagine the earth beneath your feet, all the tiny creatures under its surface, the roots reaching down, down and interweaving with one another, everything that is decaying to make way for new life, everything that is growing and quickening, layers of time laid down in soil and shale and rock and clay and sand, all supporting you, all holding you up.
Breathe and notice where the surfaces of your body touch the world around you.
This is where you are. This is where you belong, the space that Mary Oliver would call ‘your place in the family of things.’
Notice this as often as you can.
2. Practice writing as illumination
Think of your writing as a way of lighting up the darkness. In her essay, ‘Poetry is not a Luxury’ (from Your Silence Will Not Protect You, published by Silver Press), Audre Lorde called this ‘poetry as illumination’, an ‘intimacy of scrutiny’ through which we learn to be with ‘the places of possibility within ourselves’, the places that are ‘ancient and hidden [because] they have survived and grown strong through the darkness.’
Lorde writes that it is through this process, this writing as illumination of these hidden places, that ‘those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us.’
What is waiting to be illuminated in the dark spaces inside you? What is waiting to shine in the light of your words and your own private and intimate attention? Make time to tend to yourself with intimate attention. Ask yourself what you feel, what you long for, what you need.
If you find this difficult, join with others and write together. Share your stories in safe spaces. Bring your light.
3. Change your perspective
My twelve-year-old daughter and I like to go walking on ‘the tops’, an ancient limestone escarpment in the hills not far from where we live in North Yorkshire. On some days, we have only the wind and the jackdaws for company. We can see the world spread out beneath us: fields stitched together with silver roads, a shimmering lake, an Iron Age hill fort rising from the woods. The sun burning through the clouds.
Whenever we’re up there, I watch my daughter’s face relax. I can feel the tension ebbing from my own body. From up there, everything else looks and feels very small and very unimportant.
Take some time to actively change your perspective on the world today. Look up. Look out of the window. Climb a hill. Ride on the top deck of the bus. Walk a different route. Crouch down and notice what is growing in the cracks between the paving stones.
The world needs your words and your well-rested creativity. Making space for creative rest isn't a luxury. It's crucial.
What brings you pleasure? What helps you to restore yourself?
