Doing It Anyway - Creative Community Hour
You're Invited! Tonight 6:30 pm CT - Zoom Link below
I started reading Mary Oliver’s “A Poetry Handbook” this week, and she gets it started by immediately talking about this idea of keeping appointments with ourselves - as if we are in a wild romance with our conscious mind and an inner wild silky part of our hearts.
She says…
It is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy faculty of emotion) and the learned skill of the conscious mind.
They make appointments with each other, keep them, and something begins to happen. Or, they make appointments with each other but are casual and often fail to keep them: count on it, nothing happens.
Say you promise to be at your desk in the evenings, from seven to nine. It waits, it watches. If you are reliably there, it begins to show itself - soon it begins to arrive when you do. But if you are only there sometimes and are frequently late or inattentive, it will appear fleetingly, or it will not appear at all.
Why should it? It can wait. It can stay silent a lifetime. Who knows anyway what it is, that wild silky part of ourselves without which no poem can live? But we do know this: if it is going to enter into a passionate relationship and speak what is in its own portion of your mind, the other responsible and purposeful part of you had better be a Romeo.
Mary Oliver
If you are a parent, taking the time to follow through on a promise to yourself to be at your desk can feel futile and sometimes just plain mean.
If you’re like me, you’ll think about the desk while making dinner, answering questions about black holes and if trees have feelings, while herding cats with your feet, shouting about someone needing to take a shower and what books do they want to read tonight and then suddenly it’s bedtime and the romance of the desk seems not quite worth the squeeze…but Romeo is calling my friends.
And so, without further ado, this is your warm and friendly reminder that YOU ARE INVITED to join me for an hour of community time tonight!
You can bring whatever you like: a piece to write, paint, knit, sculpt, weave, or doodle.
This is a community hour just to be in good company, and honestly, I’m using all of you to keep myself accountable so that in the end, I will keep the appointment I’ve made with myself.
We will chat for the first fifteen or so and then spend the time doing our thing - whatever that is for you. I would love to see you there!
TONIGHT, March 28th from 6:30 pm - 7:30 pm CT. Use this Zoom Link
Bah! Traveling, but I want to join soon ❤️