Stepping into the Creative Unknown
It was August.
After several months of intense purging and packing and planning,
the day had arrived for us to finally leave the farm.
We’d spent the morning doing the last of the cleaning, scrubbing the insides of cupboards that had lovingly held our kitchen ware for a decade and a half, mopping the fir floors my bare feet had joyfully swept across during many solitary and coupled dances.
The night before,
I’d woken into the dark, dressed quietly so as not to stir my beloved, and slipped out onto the earth to say my last goodbyes to the plants and trees, stones and creek, gates and fences that had been my sacred, blessed companions these last 14 years.
At a little after 12pm that day,
as I steered the car slowly out the long driveway, my heart swelled with a feeling of love and gratitude:
*For the years of dancing and writing, collaging and pasteling, singing and being silent in my studio, and also the hours of mentoring and supporting women to write, collage, dance, sing and be silent there.
*For the space and courage and compassion to write a memoir that had allowed me to reflect on my relationships and breathe healing and forgiveness into those places in my body and my past that needed them, and the time and commitment to have grown and sustained my relationship with my beloved Gregory and married him in the garden beside the yellow rose tree.
On that day I left,
I wasn’t sure how the next day, month or year would go. Especially I wondered if, and how, I would find another place to be so widely and wildly creative, and so widely and wildly loving.
All of us have times in our lives when we have to let go of what we’ve known, where we have been, what we have done, how we have identified ourselves.
Life invites us, and sometimes forces us, to step into the unknown.
The beginning of a new year can feel like that, as can the uncertainty of a pandemic reaching its two year marker or the unprecedented climate events that many of us are living through.
How do you cope with the changes? What do you hold onto when everything around us is becoming unfamiliar?
Are you looking for support to make your writing into something that can hold you during uncertain times.
I would love to support you. Connect with me here to learn how…