On feeling ready, striving, and sticking with it

If you’ve been crafting a project or creative vision for some time...

Welcome to Gentle Musings, a publication about reconnecting with yourself, experiencing life as a creative practice, and living out loud. Gentle Musings is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support this work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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When I sit down to record Gentle Musings, I aim for it to be as if we’re sharing coffee (well, it wouldn’t be a monologue but you know what I mean).

I sit in my small studio, get really quiet, and share from my heart as a friend.

Writing to you by cozy things piled up: that red blanket is a fleece ‘tie blanket’, all the rage in middle school. It’s indestructible and I still remember picking out the fabric at Joann’s. That brown pillow has Krishna and Radha on the other side, made with upcycled fabrics by an older woman who was selling the lot of her handmade pillows before moving to Las Vegas.

Gentle Musings exist from the compost of many, many scrapped episodes and full ‘first’ episodes. This latest episode—On feeling ready, striving, and sticking with it—is one example. I recorded half of it a while back when I was still finding my footing (let’s be honest, still am) and made an extended up-to-date introduction.¹

I’m sharing parts of older work to highlight nonlinearity, including the nonlinearity of pursuing one’s passion and the practice of revolving closer and closer to the core of one’s body of work. It’s also in the spirit of reanimating creative impulses and slowing down to catch up with what you know.

It’s important to me to share episodes that were tucked away for so long—it demonstrates a willingness and friendliness to my process (and self) that I didn’t use to possess.

The creative process is one of integration and re-integration, both within oneself one’s body of work, and I want to visibilize this! (I talk about all of this in the episode).

After all, iterations are stunning…

An iteration is a repeated utterance. It’s evoking the same thing in a thousand ways: painting the same painting in a thousand ways, dancing the same dance in a thousand ways, writing the same concept or narrative in a thousand ways. In other words, an iteration is the latest incarnation in your creative process.

If you’ve been crafting a project or creative vision for some time (or if it has been living in your heart), this episode is for you.

In this episode, I gently muse on…

• Giving credit to your past self—spending time with them and honoring the risks they took

• The loop of striving and reachinnggg for some ideal arrival

• How categorizing our work or practice (or SELF) creates limits that we might not always be aware of (developing your principles of practice is something to explore if you resonate with this)

• Taking stock at the end of the day, not with a focus on how productive you were but with a focus on how present you were

• Becoming masterful about your whims while honoring them through ~a personal writing practice~

• How ‘sticking with it’ (whatever your ‘it’ is) is a creative practice in itself

• What ‘living out loud’ means for the different seasons of life

• Pushing open doors of opportunity with one’s whole body! And how staying true to the path of your creative desires opens doors for others.

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Already listened in? Drop a comment (or send an email) letting me know what spoke to you!

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📌 Studio happenings

This Sunday at 11:00am EST on Zoom:

A loop: a task or activity.

An open loop: an unresolved task or activity.
A closed loop: a resolved task or activity.

This is your time to prioritize one or two doable tasks that will help to free up mental space and reconnect you with your agency.

It might be fixing a wobbly chair, scrubbing off the labels of jars to upgrade your pantry storage, booking appointments, writing thank you cards, attending to forgotten emails, packing things up to drop off at Goodwill, or even drafting a budget.

There’s lots more ideas here and the Workshop Prep PDF will guide you to identify your next steps.

I don’t plan to offer this again, so if you’re interested in joining us…

You are automatically invited as a paid-subscriber of these letters and should have received all that info already—send me a note if you missed it!

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Finally Face the Page, a three-part prerecorded workshop, is 25% off until January 10th with the code WRITE2024.

As it goes with writing: everything we explore and practice applies to life far beyond the page. You get all three parts upon registration.

This is the video thumbnail for Part 2: Meeting the Stuck Places

See you on Sunday!
Thank you for being here.

XO
Maggy

PS: I’m on the lookout for a sound or video editing enthusiast to help with video and/or podcast post-production. ~You don’t have to do this professionally~ If you're interested or know someone who might be, please reply to this email or pass it along.

1. An intention for Gentle Musings this year is to deepen in ‘speaking from my heart as a friend’, which means less polishing, teaching, intentional serving (trying to extremely useful since I value your time and attention!), and more spaciousness, stream of consciousness, and honoring the whole point of this project, to gently muse out loud. If you like this type of work, drop a comment letting me know!