In the Slow Time
Trusting the Sun, and Letting Ideas Emerge [and a new release from the studio]
Sun sparks a sky show, dance with the clouds, in the space between day and the twilight. Orange glow peeks slow at first, between the clouds on a dense day, then fast as the daylight winds down its momentum. Usually I notice this while I’m cooking: a fire lit under the pan, hot, glowing orb of cloud and fire and light in the sky.
Look wide to the sky and then focus in. I’m thinking to the year ahead, the seasons to come, working back through the days and their details. This is the intention. This is the momentum, the process, the practice: we get up, the sun rises, our bodies breathe, we tend to what we can, our ideas grow and die, the moon comes, the midnight, and we keep going.
One morning in the lingering cold, the wind is cutting through, whipping around, and I walk to the water. The tide is high — a symphony rising high with each wave. A song for the city. Breath rising and falling in time. The day is just beginning. In the details, I hear the city’s soundscapes, songs and stories of what’s been discarded. Thousands of bottle shards, green and brown and broken, wash up on the shoreline, making a soundtrack like sonic glitter, as if the bottles are memories, ghosts from the past raising their glasses. The waves rock them gently against boulders, constant gentle effort smoothing their edges.
This is what we have, and this is what we can do with it. This is how I try to arrive to each day. On the days when I do not feel like writing, do not feel like walking, I tune into even these small efforts, the details, their cumulations, the repetitions. Our practices and ideas are like this: maybe something with a sharp edge gets mulled over. Maybe life tosses us around like a wave, and we learn from floating, swimming, jumping through, and getting pulled under. Creative practice and process urges us onward. There’s something in us that says let’s keep going. Here’s what I’m learning from the water: to notice obstacles and float around them. To notice what’s boulder, glass, seagull, shoreline. To notice where to flow. That even soft waters wear down shards and stone, and that the quiet, durational, gentle efforts that we make — momentum laced with steady care — is often the landscape for transformation.
Then, the sunlight. There are lessons in the skyline, too — like how trust is a part the creative process. Trusting that the ideas that visit us are not accidents, but like birds resting outside of the window, or the sunlight shifting bright red to purple orange, their presence an ephemera to be celebrated. That our ideas are signs of life, and we hold these inklings like handfuls of seeds, and cast them wide, and tend to them over time.
Like the sun, the warmth, glow, the heat, the spark, the big yes, the hum of an idea, the energy and momentum of life comes back. Our wise bodies and psyches and the richness of our communities are the grounds that hold our ideas and bring them into being; some seeds, no matter how few or how many, will grow when tended to. That our bodies in their infinite wisdoms, sentinels for sensing, know what is needed if we slow down, lean in the silence, learn to listen. That like birds and their migrating, your ideas may shift with shorelines, heatwaves, and change based on the seasons. That is okay. That what gets forgotten will either do as winter does, and go dormant, growing with us again in the heat of the spring, or be composted down to something new: dirt mixed with scraps mixed with light mixed with time and compounded. That when faced with trust and its opposite, we can look to the sunlight: like hunger, like momentum, it always comes back. Again and again it emerges.
On a Sunday, true to its name, I put my full face to the sun. The light hits and I feel that in an instant: the warm glow, the gratitude, the gladness, the breath, the tide, the shoreline. Slowness. Keep going. Our ideas, this life. Returning.
studio views:
On returning, I made a new batch of Heirloom Journals for us for Spring. They are a joy to make and a joy to write, draw, reflect in, all one of a kind. Find yours here:
nourished by, nourishing:
This week I’m reading Pew by Catherline Lacey, cooking sweet potatoes per
recipe for oven fries and inspired by reading Here’s a playlist for slowing down — one I turn to in the evenings — and one with more momentum for the spring. I’ve been writing more questions than answers in my own journal; so far a generative way of writing. If you’re in Brooklyn, we’re meeting for class tonight: try out Ink/Play, or tune into the glowing practice of gratitude.Paid subscribers, your next Seasonal Session for spring landed last week.
classes and upcoming experiences:
Join in for creative practices with me in NYC and beyond:
3/26 Ink/Play
3/26 Grounded in Gratitude: Meditation and Journaling
4/2 Creative Landscape [online]
4/4 Bookbinding: Coptic Stitch
4/4 Suminagashi Basics
4/14 Bookbinding: French Link Stitch
4/21 Earth Day Journaling
for your pages:
Creative Nourishment is a reader-supported publication by Kelly Odette Laughlin. I’m an artist, writer, and teacher located in NYC, and the founder of Odette Press. I lead creative workshops throughout the city and beyond. Thank you for being here.