A creative support love note
If you are working on a creative project, tending to a longstanding vision, or taking bold action toward a goal
Regarding Dew exists to support you in reconnecting with yourself, experiencing life as a creative practice, and finally living out loud. More here.
Over the next five days, I am going to be reigniting my writing practice by writing in the mornings, and I am invitiI am writing this letter today from a funky little hotel that I feel very lucky to be at (thanks to many coinciding synchronicities and a leap of faith). It’s my first Regarding Dew work retreat.
What does this mean? A work retreat? It means that I’m working all day (same as it ever was), but this time I’m practicing taking action in slower, bolder ways. Gulp. I could have prepared more, but I’m here! I’m easily distractable, but I’m trying! Where we are is where we start.
Every time I sense myself getting caught up in zhuzhing something — a favorite tendency as I shared in this letter, Your creativity is a force of care — or getting preoccupied with safe ‘busy work’, I’m pausing and practicing a new way.
This is a practice in what I call pivoting toward wholeness. Pivoting toward wholeness is a process of orienting toward our wholeness as the truth of our being, not as a place that we will get to in the future—in other words: wholeness is the truth, integration is a process and a practice. And in my humble opinion, it’s a creative one. We practice pivoting toward wholeness in the messiness of life and the complexity of our inner experience, exactly as these are in the moment.*
And so I’m here practicing pivoting toward wholeness and tending to Regarding Dew in a hotel-library-room, craving a sandwich, listening to Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou on the speakers, and thinking about suffering, creativity, tenderness, audacity, and patience… and writing to you.
If you are working on a creative project (or 1,000 creative projects), tending to a longstanding vision, or taking bold action toward a creative desire or goal and you are putting in so much effort, then this letter is written with you in mind.
Maybe you’re sitting in stuckness: stuck in resistance, exhaustion, doubt, fear, or going at it alone for too long. From this cozy room and through the power of these strange screens, I hope that these words meet you exactly where you are.
A short interruption to say thank you to everyone who participated in last week’s Community Discovery Writing Gathering! WOW.
Alright, a creative love note for today.
Take a moment today to reorient your perspective to looking back in time.
The saying ‘Don't look back, you're not going that way’ can also keep us in a loop of striving and reachinnggg for some ideal arrival.**
When you feel like you’re getting nowhere, it’s time to look back at how far you’ve come.
Striving through pushing off your needs or rejecting the limits of your capacity doesn’t make for more productive days. It doesn’t ensure more fulfillment, more quality, or even more impact in your work. (I’m reminding myself this too—I wrote about spinning one’s wheels last week for a reason)
For that—for the fulfillment and quality and impact that your heart craves—your work calls for you to be here for what is emerging and to learn to trust it. It asks you to stay in the spirit of curiosity, devotion, and generosity.
It’s a big ask. Each time we sit down and show up, we are asked to trust our creativity as (I imagine) our creativity learns to trust us back. Creativity craves safety.
When it comes to realizing projects: the vigor of ambition can be nutritive over depleting.
We can all prioritize building capacity over pushing through. This is slow, gentle work. This is together-work. This is embracing-your-capacity-exactly as-it-is-work. Softness is your strength. Look back!
In Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse wrote:
We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.
I think about the ‘way-showers’ that I admire: the people who have shown me what is possible, how many ways of being we can inhabit in our lives, how much possibility there really is. We can all be way-showers to each other.
Back to your heart’s work: Slow down to speed up. Gather your wishes and efforts and all of the ripples that are already rippling outward. Look back to remember that you, too, are an ancestor of your own becoming.
When we prioritize our being in the most simple and friendly of ways, there is the space for our most meaningful work to spill over without the need for constriction.
And when striving comes in, you can use that energy in service of your whole being, not as a way to override needs for rest and gentle regard. You can say: I see you, anticipation and impatience and desire! What a gift to be open to the depths of feeling and crave full expression.
I hope that you see the silver threads of delight in the humble witnessing of your deepest creative stirrings when you give them room to abide by their own logic. When you enter a pact of trust with your creativity. From this perspective, clarity chimes: your deepest visions are not incidental.
Thank you for making your work and for interacting with mine.
xo
Maggy
*Pivoting Toward Wholeness is a course that I ran earlier this year with an absolutely lovely cohort… and I LOVED facilitating it. This is a very special live course that I am planning to bring back. Get yourself on the waitlist!
**Arrival is overrated, but it’s also real (and savoring it is another thing). But aren’t you also arriving into this fresh moment right now? Haven’t you experienced countless arrivals that maybe weren’t noticed because the pace or intensity of life is turned up? Hindsight is gold. Taking stock is a generative process! Right now, I’m in the middle of writing the story of Regarding Dew for my own personal reflection, thanks to inspiration and prompts from Hiro Boga (which you can find here). And wow: compassion. Lots of compassion. I was overcome with feelings of ‘this isn’t working’ and for so long (I feel this everyday), and looking back shows me what was working, what was happening, even when it was small or slower than I’d like. And all of the detours! And all of the fruitless effort… the fruit that it bore happened over a span of time, not in the ways that I expected. I am very open to sharing some of this process of tracing the story/timeline of Regarding Dew in the next Studio Notes in case anybody is interested (again: reply to this at any point, send me a message or an email at maggy@regardingdew.com if you are!)
If you enjoyed this letter, please let me know by giving it a heart. Or share a screenshot. Or send it to a friend! Or become a paid subscriber. Or go wild and do all of the above! It lets me know what landed for you. And a small action on your part hugely supports this work.
Thank you x o x o
Maggy
Did you make it this far? Want to go deeper? Here ya go… 🕳️🐇
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