Iterating an Idea
process as an act of creative care
This week we’re celebrating five years of Odette Press. To celebrate, we’re offering 20% off subscriptions here on Substack and 20% off journals and cards in the shop.
As a process person and an artist whose work often focuses on producing many of the same thing, I find myself in the realm of habituation. I make the same meal most mornings, as I’ve written to you about, I use the same color ink, I walk the same path in a nearby park, much of which I write about here from week to week follows these repetitions. Repetition, as my teachers have repeated themselves over the years, yields insight.
I have written in a journal more days than not over the past ten years and most of the total three decades and some time that I’ve been on this earth. Writing is a practice so ingrained into my embodiment of living now that on days when I do not write but have a lot of ingredients in my mind space, I feel it like a pressure and a density throughout the day. One of the benefits of a writing practice, and doing so over time, is that we can get to know our habits, what pulls and seduces us and we can learn to challenge and befriend our internal and enacted tendencies. Writing for a few minutes a day can be a simple practice to learn to turn to for release, reiteration, and insight. Writing is a tool for pattern recognition.
Minds are beautiful, and writing practice throughout the years is one of that ways I’ve learned to befriend the mind, instead of thinking of it as an adversary. I learn to meet my thought, thinking, thoughts, ideas, and iterations therein with a greater sense of compassion. It’s taken time to arrive here — though arrival is less of a fixed state these days and more of immersion in the flow of living as a process.
As humans, we are wired to seek patterns and sameness; disruption to the same can be perceived as a threat, which our bodies and minds, unless otherwise guided, may seek to guard us against. Instinct, understanding, and information all coalesce in order to help us enact, make decisions, and create. Predictability lets us settle into a sense of safety. To move ourselves, then, consciously from that which is known and safe into the realm of the unknown is often a shock to our systems. Having rhythms in place to imprint a sense of sameness can be a balm to our lives when change rains down like a torrent on the mind. Beyond the stuck patterns of doing the same things lies a richness: when we can deviate from our sameness and commit to a state of learning, and try things again, this is where growth can happen; we can expand, shift, and change. This is iteration.
When we can get out of our minds and into the world — through things movement, songs, sensations — usually something, however small, gets unhooked. A small shift in a thought pattern, route home, an early morning ritual, an ingredient, material, or weekly routine, can shake up our minds enough for insight to occur — but not so much that we are shocked or overloaded — so that our ideas to shift and be nourished and gain form and grow. If you want a different output, try a different input.
Recently, I was talking with a friend, who was being hard on themselves for writing, and meditating, and having thoughts while doing both. Void of thought isn’t the goal, I shared. Mindfulness means your mind is full of something, and it’s doing the job it was made to do, and there’s no award given for a thoughtless state. The mind’s job is to take in information, to work with the sensations of the rest of the body in order to decide what we need do to nurture, ignore, or protect, or to decide what to try next. When we can pair our thoughts with conscious reflections on our choices, actions, outcomes, and experiences, we create an ecosystem where awareness can thrive. We gain insights on what we want to create, or how we can iterate next.
In Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen, Rebecca May Johnson writes about her iterations with a simple red sauce told through the lens of life and memories recorded in kitchen notes and her explorations of The Odyssey. Her dedicated repetitions of a simple sauce recipe unfold a whole cosmos of real, human nuance through the experience of the book. Each time she performs the recipe it takes on new flavors, and depths, shifted by the inflections of material, place, and people and so the sauce is rarely the same. Different ingredients, appetites, emotions, or environments (input) are met with met with the process (the recipe) and they created a new experience of the sauce (the output).
Like a favorite recipe, or the rhythms we turn to to equip ourselves for the flow of everyday, our minds and streams of thought are also swayed by where we are in life, how we are living, and what we choose to let into our mind’s space. The creative process then is one where we can work with our patterns, the habitual and familiar, and the novel and new, in order to find a balance between the push of novelty and the pull of the same — and dance within that whole conversation of existing. Just because something doesn’t unfold exactly how we want it to the first time doesn’t mean it’s all meant to be trashed — composting, as Natalie Goldberg calls it, and then reflecting on our experiences builds a state of awareness. We can learn from one thing and bring it forward into the next. This is the strength of iteration.
Lately, I’ve been leaning into bridging the intentional with the mundane, the abstract with the felt, bringing the stuff of the mind and the theoretical down into the everyday here on earth, and I wonder if this is what is meant by “practical magic”. Taking out the trash is not something I love in all tasks of the domestic realm, but it is a chance for renewal, and something I do to take care of myself and my space, and it’s a predictable rhythm that I can ensure will occur. This week, as I was cleaning the kitchen I thought, what if as I clean the house, I use it as a chance to clear my mind, too? I tied the strings of the plastic bag and considered what’s a thought pattern, a rumination, or a phrase is that I’ve been saying that I can leave in the dumpster out back as if it, too, were a bag of food scraps and junk mail on trash day. I did this, and the next day I woke up the next day feeling refreshed.
To iterate is to both repeat something and try something different new in the next phase. Imagine how many times O’Keefe painted flowers or visited the desert before the power of her visual language took form, think about long it takes to bake from memory, if ever, or think of how many times it takes to drive a street it takes before you learn the rhythms and intricacies of a new city. Repetition yields insight when paired with attentive awareness, and it asks us for the ingredient of time.
Caring for our ideas and creative lives asks us to tune into what we care about, to revisit and refine over time, to challenge and confront our own tendencies to stay the same, to sense when to keep an idea in our inner worlds and when to express it, and to be willing to experience ourselves honestly as we revisit and try again. This is why writing things down, talking them out, taking time, and reflecting can be so important: by making space to process and reflect, we learn what we desire to do again, compost what we no longer need, and hopefully, build up conscious awareness to learn from inevitable mistakes and failures in the process. Humility and compassion, then, enter the chat as a necessary part of the cyclical nature of this creative life, as lenses to look through to help us make choices moving forward, and be kind to ourselves in the process.
Like the breath, expanding and contracting are natural parts of life; the creative process requires this conversational dance between adding, pausing, releasing and reflecting. I think of these moments through the lens of questions — I will often reflect or ask with myself saying okay, this worked or this didn’t work, or this needs some softening, this needs some strength. What actions can I take next no matter how small to support this idea or iteration of this idea into being?
Adding might take the form of: travel, joining a team, reading a book, listening to a podcast, forming a friendship, asking for insight or assistance, getting a tattoo like a talisman, studying with a teacher, seeking out conversation, trying a new material, lifting a heavier weight, walking longer, shifting your gaze.
Clearing away might be: taking a shower, getting a haircut, leaving a job, setting a boundary around time, leaving a relationship, deep states of rest, not listening to the same song that made you cry last winter, deleting emails, throwing out the junk mail and old pens, unfollowing, taking out the recycling.
Pausing could be using what you have, the feeling of boredom, periods of time that feel like plateaus that are actually incubation stages, meditation, staring into moving water, watching a movie or tv series, the phrase “I’m not sure yet. I need to sleep on it” and then prioritizing sleep, privacy, trusting your inner life enough to not tell anyone about your idea immediately, continuing to rest.
Sometimes we might get caught thinking the creative process is somehow and easy going line: I have an idea, I like it, I want to do it, and therefore I will bring it into the world, and it will exist, and I will feel good about it, and it will be easy — but rarely is this linearity how things go. When we give our creative process the supports it needs, the foundations to return to, and the space to shift and change, that’s when our ideas can grow. When we can learn to be with the undulations and fluctuations of the minds, learn to tend to our habits and our tendencies, we can take good care of our creative lives. This week, be with your life, breathe with your process as a living thing, get rid of the mental scraps and accumulations when you need to, add on what feels good, and trust your inner wisdom to grow.
this week
Odette Press is celebrating five years of being in existence this year! Like many small businesses and artists I’ve connected with, it’s be a challenging year; adaptability is something I’m learning to be with in this season. Celebrating is central to the process here, too, and I make a cake each year to celebrate and reflect on another creative cycle around the sun. This year’s bake was olive oil and vanilla lime sponge cake, labneh icing, dehydrated limes, meringues, with blackened lime dust — a variation on this Ottolenghi recipe, cut in half, with limes instead. Thank you to everyone who’s been along for the creative ride for short moments or the long stretch over these last five years.
Use code fiveyears over at odettepress.us for 20% off through 7/31
experiences
July 26 Creative Vessels: Practices in Care
August 13 Suminagashi Basics (Brooklyn)
August 19 + 20 Renegade Craft Fair (Brooklyn)
August 24 Suminagashi Basics (Brooklyn)
August 31 Pamphlet Stitch Bookbinding (Brooklyn)
Head to the recording library for guided writing experiences on intentions, ideas, focusing, and courage. Paid subscribers here on Substack have access to a guided writing and reflection library — videos and prompts for creative process.
