The motto for the Writing Life circles I facilitate is: Nourish Yourself. Honour Your Voice. Write Your Stories.
“Nourish” is the word sitting with me these days as I’m considering rest as an essential part of the nourishment in one’s writing life. A prose poem I drafted a few weeks ago begins:
Monday, under a mackerel sky, and “nourish” is the word that comes to mind as I plot the week
ahead, etch reminders in my calendar, defy the rusted old list of ragged thoughts and mangy tasks
to embrace (rather than pine for) a spiral of divine dailiness, ongoing repair, make notes in a binder
of archetypes like nomad and gypsy – yes, the scratch of a pen rather than the click of a key or a
distracting arrow on a back-lit screen. My sanctuary is a womb of comfort, sunlit and magical, while
I embrace full-bodied thoughts of the ancient, a kinder earth-based society, vibrant and festive as well as
mysterious with an embracing shroud of memory . . .
.An earlier writing circle motto when I began the circles almost thirty years ago was: Be seen. Be heard. Be amazed at what comes out of the stillness.
Stillness is one way to nourish ourselves. Not that the ideas stop, in fact, it’s an ideal time to have them percolate; a time to be open to new possibilities. Rather than jump on those ideas though, I’m finding it just fine to let them accumulate.
As creativity coach Eric Maisel writes: “Creative life demands more than endurance; it requires rhythms of stillness, reflection, and retreat. Artists who honor these rhythms recognize that the right to pause is not indulgent – it is essential.”
And yet I’m typing here and posting a blog! This writing began in my journal and has evolved over a number of days as I contemplate the need for rest and renewal. The natural world tries to teach us that all the time.
In a recent substack, Eric Maisel refers to a writer in Buenos Aires who took a year off and “let writing happen only when it wanted to.” That’s what I’ve been doing lately since back pain had me leaning against heat for most of several days. It’s best to take breaks before that happens.
I’m remembering Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way in which one of the six weeks of her course is meant to include “reading deprivation.” We have many more distractions these days than when Julia wrote her groundbreaking book on creative recovery. A break from all sorts of stimuli is a good rest for the nervous system. As Eric says: “Refusing to honor cycles of pause is to deny the rhythms of human creativity itself.”
Several years ago, when I also felt weary from a lot of outward-going energy, I attended a day-long workshop with David Whyte at Royal Roads University in Victoria, B.C.
During the workshop, called “What to Remember When Waking,” David said: “A good sense of rest is going to put you in touch with the world again.”
“Deep rest is deeply transformative,” David said that day. “Rest isn’t a non-doing but an intentionality.”
“Rest is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be,” David writes in Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
“We are rested when we let things alone and let ourselves alone, to do what we do best, breathe as the body intended us to breathe, to walk as we were meant to walk, to live with the rhythm of a house and a home, giving and taking through cooking and cleaning. When we give and take in an easy foundational way we are closest to the authentic self, and closest to that self when we are most rested.”
Let’s take some rest as nourishment. That could mean saying “no” to some party invitations too as tempting as they are. Sometimes a one-to-one connection with someone or time spent quietly on your own, can be the best nourishment of all.