It's Monday morning, a new day, a new week and a new season. The autumn equinox has just passed and is the turning point towards winter, a prospect that is not always welcomed or celebrated, and yet -- whilst I'll miss the sun soaking into my skin and the feeling of wellbeing and liberation that the summer can bring -- I feel the autumn and winter somehow gives permission for time to focus more inwardly.
In the quiet, when the leaves are changing colours and the trees are preparing to shed, I feel nature's permission to be quiet and slow and to reflect - and so to create. I feel this permission in my core and the writing of it in my journal is imprinting it so that it cannot be easily forgotten.
The challenge I am faced with is to create (and maintain) a structure to my week which balances heading out into the world, with time to regularly be slow and deliberate and leave room for the unknown. If I wait for time and space to materialise, it may never, I am so used to filling every gap with doing, reacting, busying myself.
When the whole world seems to be applauding busier, noisier, more content, more outgoing, I must listen instead to nature’s wisdom and my own cycles and seasons. The organised doer in me cries, “but there is so much to attend to and react to…finish this and this and this first,” and I must somehow firmly set that urgent voice aside on certain days and at certain times.
Do you structure time for resting and creativity or do you wait and see what happens and when you have time for it?
What small promise could you make and commit to for the next few weeks as an experiment?
Permission to create and permission to rest are deeply connected in my view. Whilst making and developing, practice and mastery, is work - artistic expression is a form of resting in oneself, allowing something to come through rather than using force. And so, this feels to me to be the key, to rest in my own company and be with myself, as the foundation for creativity to emerge and flow.
Without any to-dos, deadlines or accountability, what if all I do is daydream and nap? I have some faith that if I come from a softer, more yielding place, if I let myself turn in and turn up, then my creativity will start to surface and unravel. I’ve written this down now, so I feel more motivated to experiment these next two weeks with structuring time to pause and drop into a different way of being.
