Hello beautiful human,
The Chef is visiting and consequently the day is about to fill up with plans for rosemary syrups, rhubarb extractions, basil muddles and all flavors of citrus. We’re collaborating on a project that finds each of us in new territory, leaving behind expertise for experimentation. It’s another new collaborative project in my life. It seems this is the season.
I’m a big believer in collaborations but I haven’t always been very good at them. I notice this time around, I’m coming to the idea differently, with a delicate curiosity, a willingness to “wait and see" that is not my usual mode. At least it didn’t used to be. I’ve always had a mind that leaps ahead, jumping in a nanosecond from the kernel of a new idea to a dozen different outcomes and directions and shiny visions of the future. I’ve always had a huge bank of energy to draw on to peddle towards those visions and I have and… they haven’t always panned out how I expected. I’ve missed the mark.
These days I feel a little more grounded in the immediacy of where I am, maybe because I am still actively discovering the answer to that basic question: where am I now? So a day of rhubarb and rosemary can be just that…if it leads to something else or grows into Next, well, that will be a celebration for a different day. I don’t have to plan it now or make any promises. I just have to push the button on the blender.
It’s a very new sensation for me, to be so present in the moment, so satisfied with it (although satisfied is a tricky word and a voice whispers But am I though?), and so…patient, is the word that comes to mind. It’s not that I don’t have fears and insecurities and restlessness to wrestle with. I do. But somehow, at least this morning, this week, I no longer hoist all the weight of those battles, all the imagined outcome, onto my creative projects. Including what happens here in An Inviting Space. I don’t have to solve or resolve my anxieties, I can simply make a space for them next to me here at the desk. I certainly don’t have to ask my creative processes to resolve them. That’s a radical reshuffling for me that I’m still feeling into.
It’s a conundrum, to go through the world in an inescapable state of not knowing, which I like to call the human condition. We don’t know why we’re here, we don’t know what we’re doing, we don’t know what we’re supposed to be doing, we don’t know how we’re going to feel tomorrow or what next week or next year will bring, we’re still wondering how we’re going to pay the bills, have the conversation, repair the car, support the kid etc etc etc. And maybe because all of this not knowing is so uncomfortable, we project desperately and invest deeply in scripts we’re handed: family patterns, cultural norms, conspiracy theories, and a whole broad range of institutions are happy to tell us: we do know. There is a map. We have made it to success or we can, if we do XYZ. Here, these are the Markers to Measure By.
But all of those markers and all of that noise…none of it really resolves the essential, existential anxiety of living does it?
Listen. Here’s what I think this morning: it’s rhubarb and rosemary all the way down. We be where we are. We find the pleasures and gratitudes of the day because we keep a lookout for them. And among those gifts, because of those gifts, we can acknowledge fear, anxiety, insecurity, and any number of temperamental traits we might struggle with, we can dialogue with them, we can be gentle with them and with ourselves and say, Yes, I know you’re here with me on this ride. We’re going to go on a treasure hunt now. Won’t that be fun?
What I realize, what I wonder, is, do those of us who are writers, artists, creatives of all flavors, put too much pressure on our creations to sort it out for us? To give us sense of identity, purpose, a sense of direction? And… what if we didn’t?
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