Sunshine after a long winter
An introduction to my creative experiment, and a poem of spring delight
Sharing today a day later than planned but with good reason: we have left the snowy north and are spending a week in the sunshine in Florida. This is my children’s first time out of the Great Lakes region and my husband’s first time this far south. We are traveling with my parents, and it is impossible to find a quiet place to write in our little condo, so I’ve given up on privacy and am just writing in the open.
This morning on a walk along the Tampa Bay, I saw two dolphins and a stingray, so many strange and beautiful birds, and felt the sun on my bare skin. This all feels like an immense gift. Mostly, the sun. Despite being on the ocean, I am still half in the Great Lakes in my mind. I am reading a beautiful essay collection called Fresh Water: Women Writing on the Great Lakes that I picked up at the library before our trip. My legs dripping in salt water, my hand clutching a collection of lacustrine stories.
At the beginning of the year, I committed to walking to Lake Michigan each day I was home. I’ve mentioned before that I quickly failed at this commitment, but the act of walking–and the solitude I carve out for myself in the act of it–has opened up something for me. I have spent the last six-plus years struggling to balance my creative work with my life as a mother. I’m sure I don’t need to go into the details of this; you understand. Whether or not you are a parent, I can imagine that the responsibilities of your day to day can make it difficult to find space for the work you feel compelled to do, especially (in this economy) if it is work that does not pay the bills.
After starting my daily walking experiment, I have been encouraged to press further, to build on the growth I have already experienced and develop a more expansive creative experiment. Adding in rhythms that work with the chaos and constraints of domestic life, believing that there is always room for my creative pursuits (even when it doesn’t feel that way).
And so, I begin. Alternating between essays about life on Lake Michigan and living in community, I plan to also share here what I am learning about creative rhythms. I have begun implementing various shifts into my life, and am excited to share them with you in the weeks and months to come. I hope they are helpful. I also hope to hear from you about what you are doing to find room in your life for creative projects.
It feels important to clarify that I believe life is inherently creative. Domestic life, being a caregiver, being a human is a constant act of creation and problem solving. Creativity is not confined to art. Creativity exists in the ways we nurture the next generation, in the ways we build community, in how we design our gardens. All of it is immensely important.
I firmly believe in the beauty of these forms of creation, in the life that our hands bring forth when making dinner, singing to our children, weeding a garden, and I acknowledge that I have done important work in this regard over the last nearly seven years of motherhood. And, I crave more. I have to write, even if it is just lines scratched in my notebook or voice memo poem spoken on a walk home.
A few weeks ago, I asked here and on Instagram what folks have learned about how to create more. Answers consistently included letting go of perfection: be it the belief that the environment has to be perfect or that the outcome needs to be perfect. Just make something, even if it isn’t ideal.
This advice is so helpful for me in navigating how to make room for creative endeavors in domestic life. It is rare that I get large chunks of time alone to devote to anything. But I am learning that a 30-minute walk to brainstorm each day, pieced together with keeping a notebook on me at all times, talking about my writing with my friends, and carving out just one or two hours when I can to devote to writing and editing is enough.
It may be slow progress, but it is creation. And if there is one thing the lake has taught me, it is that slow progress adds up. The ice on the shore builds and builds until one day, the ice shelf is a few hundred feet out and the world is a tundra. And just as steadily, the ice melts, transformed each day until again it is spring, which of course, slowly leads to those perfect swimming days of September. The pace of the landscape (I’ve written about this before) is slow. It’s okay if ours is too.
Thank you for being here with me in the building phase. I hope you find the room to build something, too.
Today, I am sharing a poem for my paid subscribers. Hello to my new paid subscribers; I am so grateful to those who have newly committed their support in the past couple of weeks! Once a month, you’ll receive a poem in your inbox. Today’s poem is one I wrote on one of my lake walks this year.
