This morning I walked my favourite route through the woods near where I live. The light dusting of frost had dissolved, there was a warmth to the sun. The forest felt alive with colour. The fox-fur rust of the dried beech leaves and the flattened bracken. The day-glo green of the mounds of moss. The light cutting through the slices of trees in a way I cannot capture no matter how many times I try on my phone.
It is Imbolc. In the Celtic Calendar Imbolc marks a ritual threshold - a slow unfurling from the velvet darkness of dream-time and Winter into the stirrings of the more outward, upward movement of Spring.
I sat for a while at a spot at the top of a small hill, where the forest falls off down to the right before the path follows suit and winds down into a darker cloak of trees. I could feel the change. A change that I’ve noticed over the last week or so in the tone of the chatter and the intention of the birds as they feed outside my kitchen window. An excitement, an energy shift. I could sense it too beneath my feet as I sat on my mossy perch in the sun. Soil, worms, seeds, fungus – on the move.
Today in Ireland is also the day we celebrate Brigid – Lá Fhéile Bríde – a woman whose wisdom and influence has had a long over-due reframing and resurgence in the last number of years. I am new to Brigid, I do not know her so well. But for me she has begun to invoke a commitment to stay on the path of my soul, to move with firey determination towards my dreams.
But it is the how of this that has been so powerful for me.
Brigid exists in a liminal space – she is both masculine and feminine, possessing both the steely forward moving focus of the masculine and the elliptical, weaving, non-linear approach of the feminine. It is in this alchemical marriage of the two that her power presides.
Which brings me to what I wanted to write to you about today.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the habits and rituals involved in creative practice.
About what it means to be a writer.
About what it means to have the space to create.
If you’ve been reading this Substack for long, you’ll know about my own determination to write, a determination I’ve been coaxing the embers of for many years, embers that have in the last two or three years, turned into the lick of flames.
It is not a fire that is always easy to keep burning – insecurities, motherhood, the tug of so many other commitments – so often threaten to quench the flames. But I am now three or so years into writing consistently - it is rare that I do not get some moments in a day to put words on a page. I have managed to write a book (which is out there now, finding itself a home). I have ideas percolating for the next one. Many things have changed that have made this possible, but I think at the heart of it, it has been a shift in me. A shift in my self-belief, in my determination. And a learning that there must, always, be a dance between the masculine arrow and the feminine weave.
Rilke writes:
Ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write?
The answer for me, over and over, is yes. But what does ‘to write’ mean? What is my creative practice? Is it simply about having a room, space, time? I am no longer certain that it is. There is so much to say on this subject, but for today, I thought I would share with you 5:
ways I have come to understand my writing,
ways I have found to move between the masculine doing and the feminine ‘be’
ways that have really helped me to keep. on. going.
I hope you find them useful. I know I’ve gleaned much from recent posts by writers I admire hugely on how they create, check some of them out here and here and here.
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