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At the start of October, my partner and I had a conversation around how to meaningfully stay informed in polycrisis, especially in the evening when the compulsive snacking on information throughout the day turned into fully immersive despair.
We talked about what degree of staying informed is necessary according to one’s own principles, when overconsuming becomes its own sort of numbing, and what about when what’s happening is a way to see if loved ones are safe… I don’t have the answers. But from our conversation, we’ve both shifted what consuming information looks like and what we do with it.
This opened up space to reflect more deeply on how I want to show up for the long run in all areas of my life. This means both what’s required of me daily and what requires decades to nurture.
I think about who I want to be as a friend, as a spouse, as a daughter and sister, as a neighbor, as someone who supports people to live in accordance with their innate creativity in a society that tells us it’s impractical (it isn’t) or that it requires gatekeepers for legitimacy (it doesn’t) or that it’s too late (it’s not). Lately, I think about who I want to be as a mother. And then beyond every role, I think about who I am to myself.
In preparation for the start of Pivoting Toward Wholeness in January (which you are warmly invited to), I sat with James Baldwin’s speech The Struggle of The Artist. If you haven’t listened or read it before, if you call yourself an artist or writer or if you want to call yourself an artist or writer, I hope you prioritize being with his words. Here’s one part from his speech that I know many of you can relate to:
All right, I said the cat survived all that, and—this is a very crucial thing—you know dirty socks can make you feel like nothing but a dirty sock. You walk into a room and somebody says, “What do you do?” And you say, “I write.” And they say, “Yeah, but what do you do?” And you wonder, what do you do? And what’s it for? Why don’t you get a job? And somehow you can’t, and finally you learn this in the most terrible way, because you try. You’re in the position of someone on the edge of a field, and it’s cold in the field, and there’s a house over there, and there’s fire in the house, and food and everything you need, everything you want, and you make all kinds of efforts to get into the house. And they would let you in; they would let you in. They’re not being cruel. They recognize you as you come to the door, and they can’t let you in. You get in, let us say, for five minutes and you can’t stay.
In the video at the top of this letter, I share reflections on my process as it relates to Regarding Dew.
If you work for yourself, if you share your creativity online, and if you also like hearing about people’s process when it’s still in process (I love that, maybe you do too), then I hope you give it a watch.
These are gentle musings on running a business that uses internet platforms, sharing personal process and practice vs personal narrative, making ‘content’, switching gears (as in not doing 21 workshops next year!!), being perceived and navigating a culture of hyper-individualism, embodying values, strategy pivoting, over-preparing/waiting as a way of taking care of vulnerability and the zone of proximal development in terms of being in direct conversation and collaboration with people I admire, the pull to make more things by hand…
In the nature of finding my way, everything I touch on in the video is an iceberg. Anyway, James Baldwin says it out loud best. So to close, here are the opening lines of his speech, which are ringing through my mind:
I really don’t like words like “artist” or “integrity” or “courage” or “nobility.” I have a kind of distrust of all those words because I don’t really know what they mean, any more than I really know what such words as “democracy” or “peace” or “peace-loving” or “warlike” or “integration” mean. And yet one is compelled to recognize that all these imprecise words are attempts made by us all to get to something which is real and which lives behind the words. Whether I like it or not, for example, and no matter what I call myself, I suppose the only word for me, when the chips are down, is that I am an artist. There is such a thing. There is such a thing as integrity. Some people are noble. There is such a thing as courage. The terrible thing is that the reality behind these words depends ultimately on what the human being (meaning every single one of us) believes to be real. The terrible thing is that the reality behind all these words depends on choices one has got to make, for ever and ever and ever, every day.
Thank you for being here xx
Maggy
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