Creatively Nourished
A practice + the nutrients for life
I have an appetite. I have an appetite for life in many ways. I want to taste things, use materials, be in the thick of experience, savor life, and try new things. I want to write and be with experiences. I want to nurture my life in the process.
It’s taken me a lot of time to arrive here — to this journey of experience, to this place of acceptance, to this place of being at the confluence of both woman and artist with an appetite in an era that wants us to behave otherwise. This taste for life is enlivening; this appetite is inherent in my creative process.
I’m talking here specifically about food and broadly about the metaphorical nutrients that we might invite into our lives. The things that we want to taste, the things we bring in that help us tend to our creative practices. People, places, routes we take, songs, thoughts, rhythms, movies, routines, conversations — the parts of creative practice that are not necessarily the about output but rather the parts of the process that nourish our ideas — the input.
Let this letter be a counterweight to the trope of the starving artist. Enough of that. Let this be the season of artists in abundance. Let this be the season of the creatively well fed.
There’s a picture of my grandmother, Odette, that I keep on my dresser. She is at a table surrounded by family; she is smiling, and the glimpse of the image is a sliver of time filled with movement, sound, and love. Food was her love language no matter the season. Food is a language that transcended borders, boundaries, and what one could say beyond the confines of language. My grandparents’ kitchen smelled often like lemons, garlic, olive oil and sounded like the whirring spin of the food processor making hummus, tasted like extra servings of cake, with both of my grandparents taking turns to make meals and take care of each other.
The picture I turn to is a two inch black and white photograph that I keep propped up on the back of my dresser. It acts as a reminder and altar to the ancestral plane. In the photo, she young, present, and smiling while everyone around the table passes plates of food. These memories — tastes, sounds, the passing of plates — are the influence of the colors, choices, and shades for the notebooks that I make: Lemon, Thyme, Fig, Olive, to name a few. More on those here.
Like food, ancestral stories and what we envision for our present lives and our futures can be a source of nutrition: the things we infuse into our bones and our souls, the stuff that we bring forward into our futures.
What we bring into our days, our minds, our lives, our bodies, and our psyches has the potential to impact our experiences and energy. Beyond food, there are so many ways of nourishing ourselves: intellectually (conversations, questions, books, relationships) communally, physically, environmentally. We are nourished or depleted at any minute by things like thoughts, ideas, stories, by the atmospheres within and around us as the earth and the universe outside of us is also constantly in this state of creation and change. It’s generating, expanding, producing, and compressing, engaged in the practices of living and dying off. Creativity is nature’s natural state; nature, creativity, and community are the nutrients and ingredients that we all need.
Writing feels like a necessary nutrient. It’s a way of organizing and orienting in life, sifting out the pits and clumps of our experiences. Creative practice and the art of life can be a recipe for how we live, and it’s not measured solely by what we share or how often or how we are expressing.
Maybe the way you live your life is like baking: measured, weighed out, exact. You wake up and do the same things for the same amount of time and it must be precise and on time with very little room for error. Maybe your recipe is more like a coursed out dinner, a picnic in the park, or quick collage of ingredients on top of a slab of bread consumed quickly while standing at a counter with minutes to spare in the thick heat of a summer day.
However you’re living to your life, tend to it. Write, make, live, create in a way that feels good — that feels like like what you need in the moment. Transcend the tropes of the things that feel confining. Delight in your own taste. What are you excited about creatively tasting, experiencing, or unfolding? As Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes in The Women Who Run With the Wolves, “What is the basic nutrition for the soul?”
This week, list those things. Write the list, feel into the list, and pick from the list as you make your way through the recipe, rhythms, or the days of your life.
Try these practices:
Slowly sip a drink or eat a piece of fruit and write about your experience
Reflect on the experiences or events that have inspired you: the meals with friends that you’ve laughed through, the places that revive you. Savor the memory of those experiences as you write, draw, or reflect
Make a list of the things that restore you. Set your environment with cues to help you remember these things. Turn to this list as often as you can.
To nourish your practice, come to class: Creative Vessels is an hour-long online class filled with writing prompts, meditation invitations, and embodied ways to tend to your ideas and creative life. Think of it as nutrients for your ideas, practices for protection, and caring for the ways you that share your stories with the world. That’s on July 26. Sign up here. Reach out with any questions.
this week,
LISTENING | revisiting this podcast episode with
and on this week’s walks. Listen to Summer Hum here, a playlist for your hot days and summer season adventures, or revisit this letter from last season on writing and kitchen practice.READING | Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen by and Searching for Stars on An Island in Maine by Alan Lightman (more on Bookshop)
NOURISHED BY | Fruit, sardines, sunlight, herbs, dark chocolate. I love learning from the work of for plant wisdom and herbs to keep my body and mind well in all seasons.
upcoming events:
July 26 Creative Vessels: Practices in Care
August 13 Suminagashi Basics (Brooklyn)
August 19 + 20 Renegade Craft Fair (Brooklyn)
August 31 Pamphlet Stitch Bookbinding (Brooklyn)
Head to the recording library for journaling classes
