Giving Yourself Permission (and a warm-up prompt)

Dear Brave Ones, I think a lot about the act of writing and the written word. I often think of the difficulties we discover sitting down to write. Some of the voices I hear say, "Who am I to do this? And what would I have to say? I have so much to say I don't know where to begin. I always make a mish-mosh and get discouraged, what's the point? It would be so much easier if the world would just value my mess!"

I've been looking at a lot of visual art lately, (Jennifer Packer's work - at The Whitney https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvYrqE1l_Os - is amazing!). And I’ve also been especially interested in artists who make their own pigment. Kaori Someva and Bill Jensen invent their own paint from minerals...

I think that's a lot like my own process which involves discovering a lot of earthy mineral content (not necessarily personal content) that doesn't make a lot of sense at first, and then working and reworking it until it becomes something through the act of composing. It is in many ways like a poem, a made thing (from the Greek word poiesis for making) but it doesn't have to be a poem, it could be anything.

I wouldn't care too much about whatever I was writing if it didn't come from somewhere deep inside of me. If I wasn't connected to it, and if it wasn't grappling with whatever I'm grappling with. Because the work it takes to get it where it needs to be can be long and hard.

Of course doing a lot of that work in Brave Space helps because we are not alone in our process. Knowing others are struggling alongside us is actually helpful. Seeing each other via zoom is proof that in Brave Space none of us struggle alone. So if you're feeling as if you want to make something, and you want some support accessing the deepest parts of yourself, come to Brave Space.

If you are struggling alone and unable to come to Brave Space for any reason, try giving yourself permission to make a mess with your writing. Decide to see what happens if you let yourself do a little warm up. Here’s the Brave Space warm-up from 2 weeks ago, so you can see if it’ll work for you:

Warm-up with earth. Write for 5 minutes (or 10) without stopping, letting everything come up through you without censoring. Be the earth, be the soil, the clay or the mud, the ooze, the muck, be the flower bed, the mulch, be the sod, be the seed, be the thing that lives beneath, the worm, the midge, the blind mole, the mice, the vole. Consider your fingernails in the earth, your hands and your toes. Your face and the mud mask, your bottom on the mudslide, the physical sensations of earth against your skin. What are your memories of earth, your dreams of earth, your wet or dry seasons, your accidents spilling onto it, tripping against it, how has it caught you unaware or surprised you, what have you made with it or imagined making, grown in it, planted or buried, put to rest or resurrected?

Leave whatever you wrote for at least a day if not more. When you come back to it, what does it want to be? Can you make it into something? What parts appeal to you? How can you let it be what it wants to be? How can you support it on its journey?

We live in a product-oriented world. Art is process-oriented. Your warm-up might not want to be anything but a warm-up, and that’s fine. What did the process do for you? How did you feel before, during and after? What did you learn?