Meryl Peep, the youngest hen, admiring her first green egg.
Highlights have been the addition of a flock of six backyard chickens (who just started laying eggs a few weeks ago), placing more love and attention in my backyard gardens, the new practice of creating tiny sacred art books (see all of them on YouTube, including this - my first one), making progress on a new stitch book (see all the pages on Instagram), and a new fall offering with Stanford BeWell coming up this October (read more about that here).
The thing that hasn't shown up anywhere in public is the practice that has helped to carry me through the pandemic years -- gathering on ZOOM with fellow creative seekers for sacred time to create together. Whether it's writing practice, or mixed media art, or both, these cherished friends of mine meet regularly, one-on-one, to feed and nurture our own creative practices.
We come together to practice the art of meeting ourselves as we create.
We aren't trying to produce something for someone else.
We are engaging with what is here now, and following the lead of the creative impulse, without knowing where it will go today.
In each practice, we see something about ourselves that could only have come from this time together.
The late summer seedlings, just a few days old.
I have a shelf full of seed packets, which I've been gathering throughout the past year, dreaming of the things that would grow in my garden. I notice that every time I actually put seeds in the ground, it is a moment when hope becomes trust.
Hope is keeping the seed packets on the shelf and admiring the pretty pictures of the things that might grow. But trust is putting those tiny vulnerable seeds into the ground or a pot, not knowing if the conditions will be right for germination and growth, or if predators will come along the way.
Trust is taking care of the soil the seeds are put in, even before I'm able to see a result. Trust can ripen into joy, or trust can result in a momentary broken heart when the young seedlings becomes food for caterpillars.
Hope cannot become trust without risk.
Planting a seed, choosing to gather together (whether in-person or online), making a mark, committing to a practice - each of these actions involves risk.
As I feel myself waking up slowly to the new world of the post-pandemic, I am beginning to befriend risk again. What once felt like small risks seem to have higher stakes now. So the steps are smaller, slower, more gentle, perhaps more inward. But still moving, growing, and alive.
Wishing you ways to find your practices, to find your gatherings, and to look for the moments in your life when hope can become trust.
Check out my new fall offering with Stanford BeWell — registration opens September 1st!
