It might be helpful to remember to breathe–that this too is life. It is sketching lines, and erasing lines and building a map of the forest floor of your work that is much more than regurgitated information consumed in haste, and is instead an embodied and relational process full of growth, decay, and regeneration.
Life, death, life.
It is overflowing with pauses, and incomplete sentences, with fragments of understanding amidst hours of confusion, with sensory experiences, sunrises, sunsets, illness, wellness, sleeping, weeping, laughing and the still hot noon of boredom, the endless midnights of grief. It is as full of the coming together and falling apart that is life as as the forest floor is layered with leaves, soil, roots, and seen and unseen beings that engage in a sensorial dance; the texture of moss, the scent of damp earth, the sound the leaves make at the touch of the sunrise.
Creativity (for your work is a creative process) is not a lonely, isolated experience, but a relational one, deeply intertwined with the world around you.
All creativity, belongs to you, and yet it is not yours alone. Academic creativity even more so. While it arises from the personal inner landscape it draws its lifeblood from the cultural stories, social fabric, and ecological realities that surround us. It is an act of reciprocity, of giving and receiving. The hand that each line is sketched, or erased by is guided by the myriad voices and forces of our collective existence.
You are not alone.
You tread paths laid down by generations, digging deep into the cultural understory and reaching high into social canopies that shape your worldviews. Your creative expressions, in turn, seed new growth, contributing to the ecosystem of ideas that sustains our collective consciousness. Your plant forests with your hard work, with your heart, with your mind.
It may be helpful to remember that when we look at the work of others that we usually see results and not the process. We see the manicured, groomed version of the map, not the chaos that it was built from.
It could be helpful to understand the process as what it might be.
It might be connected to community and the environment, to other humans and to the vast and limitless more than human world.
Carry on.
