And here we are again, for our second collection of monthly delights! I’m so excited to share all of my most recent, most favorite things with you. But first, a little personal update. Just because it feels good. 🥰
I’m writing this (now that I’ve finished sobbing my way through the Barbie movie) on the plane flying back to Nashville after spending the past week with my partner for Thanksgiving. Not only was this our first holiday spent together, but it was my first holiday spent with a partner ever (can you believe?!). It was also my first holiday spent doing something akin to parenting, as I’m slowly easing into that new role and identity with his children as well.
As silly as it may sound, I have to tell you that watching this movie just unlocked some things in me, allowing me to really begin processing and integrating the enormity of my holiday experience. I understand now why so many people kept telling me I needed to see it. The theme of choosing to really feel and experience what is impermanent and imperfect in order to become fully human… this is exactly what it feels like has been happening to me. Stepping out of the boat of my cultivated aloneness and onto the water of home and family — to see if it can actually hold me.
As I sit with my body and give her the permission to feel every feeling, I hear her, once again, reminding me that this an enormous, unprecedented transformation for me. Everything is brand new, there is very little familiarity. My body is experiencing and integrating (and sometimes, yes, resisting) so much growth and expansion and letting go. So much loving and feeling, building and belonging. I’d already had a hunch that I would need to give myself extra time to write November’s second essay because the specific subject matter is so valuable and important to me. That hunch was confirmed after arriving for Thanksgiving and feeling so strongly that I wanted to focus on being a fully present partner and parent for the very first time.
In the past, I would have felt the stress and pressure to meet the deadline and perform perfectly, and I would have told myself that it had everything to do with discipline and responsibility. In truth, that disposition and the resulting behaviors would have been the excuses I was hiding behind to keep from being all here, feeling everything. Luckily, I know this about myself now. And luckily, I’d already decided to start taking the month of December off from public writing every year to honor my anniversary of starting The Artist’s Way and my continued-ever-since morning pages practice that began on December 1, 2021.
So my next Love Letter, finally telling my side of the story of the infamous Joshua Tree Photo Exvangelical Online Outrage Spectacle (we really need to find a better working title for this) will be coming to you sometime in December, whenever it’s ready, and it’ll be the only essay I’m publishing for December. I’ll still share the bonus posts like these Delights and the Ask Me Anything, but I’m going to keep any and all other creative writing private and sacred for the rest of the month. To create ceremony, to give thanks, and to allow for rest and recovery.
Because how you do anything is how you do everything, you know? And because I really, genuinely believe that giving my full attention to whatever is actually in front of me will be most enjoyable and lucrative decision for my life and my writing. At least, I finally feel brave enough to start running that experiment. To gather the data and probably find out something new that upends all of my previous ideas and conceptions of what is allowed when producing for public consumption.
And also, you know, living.
In other words: I finally feel brave enough and safe enough to begin asking the question “can I trust my body?” even as it relates to my career and my creativity. To trust my instincts when I want to close the laptop and connect instead, or wander around my new hometown for an hour just like I would if I was in London or New York City, acquainting myself with the sights and the sounds and eventually getting lost in the shelves of the library. Just like I would if I was in London or New York City. Which is where I was standing on Monday afternoon when the realization hit me that these shelves aren’t just shelves I’m visiting as a tourist, as I’ve spent most of my life doing, in places like London or New York City.
These specific shelves, and this specific library, are my home now, too.
Can I trust my body when she asks me to stop writing so she can send me on a scavenger hunt to discover that feeling? Can I lean all of the way in when she wants me to put down the work, wants me to pause long enough to breathe and expand into every feeling offering itself to me in this season? Can I believe that being all here, wherever I am, allows me to step into my creative flow so much more successfully and abundantly?
Could it be that maybe my body knows when what we need is movement or sunshine or to simply stop forcing? And that she deserves to be trusted in her knowing?
Anyway, this is what my body and I have been doing and feeling while I have also been steadily and thoroughly working on an essay about one of my most important life experiences so needless to say: I’m taking it all very slowly. And doesn’t that make the most sense anyway? Everything is slowing right now, it’s the season for it. My body is teaching me to embrace the softness of Wintering. And that posture and pace is allowing me to feel, fully, every second of my real life in between the writing and the creating.
And so here, finally, are some of my most delighted in things that have kept me company over the past month as all of this has been unfolding. Like two of the most inspiring podcast episodes I’ve heard in a long time, a classic novel I’m re-reading that is changing the way I write, and the literal most delicious sweet-potato-based holiday side dish I have ever tasted. Along with so many other wonderful things to hear and do and feel and read. I hope that you will love them as much as I do. And I hope you are allowing your body to teach you about the wisdom of gentleness and presence in this season. 😘