Three creative things you can do right now to nurture yourself and your writing

Because the world needs your creativity and your unique you-ness

Dear friends,

What a week.

Maybe like me you’re feeling a swirl of different emotions – rage, sorrow, pain, loss, fear, hope, new determination. (Maybe like me you need to take a moment to pause and just notice what you’re feeling right now.)

All I know for certain is that the world needs people like you more than ever before. It needs the writers, the artists, the makers, the dreamers, the envisioners. It needs your words, your voice, your active imagination.

It needs your you-ness.

To go on making art, to go on raising your voice and writing your words amidst all the noise and chaos, you will need to take extra special and tender care of yourself.

Here are three suggestions for ways that you can do that this week:

1. Feel your body supported by the earth

Take a deep breath. Feel your feet on the floor, your body supported by the chair. Feel the temperature of the air on your skin. Sense into the movements that your body makes as you move through time and space.

You might want to close your eyes and imagine the earth beneath your feet, all the tiny creatures under its surface, the roots reaching down, down and interweaving with one another, everything that is decaying to make way for new life, everything that is growing and quickening, layers of time laid down in soil and shale and rock and clay and sand, all supporting you, all holding you up.

Breathe and notice where the surfaces of your body touch the world around you.

This is where you are. This is where you belong, the space that Mary Oliver would call ‘your place in the family of things.’

Notice this as often as you can.

2. Practice writing as illumination

Think of your writing as a way of lighting up the darkness. Audre Lorde called this ‘poetry as illumination’, an ‘intimacy of scrutiny’ through which we learn to be with ‘the places of possibility within ourselves’, the places that are ‘ancient and hidden [because] they have survived and grown strong through the darkness.’

Lorde writes that it is through this process, this writing as illumination of these hidden places, that ‘those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us.’ ¹

What is waiting to be illuminated in the dark spaces inside you? What is waiting to shine in the light of your words and your own private and intimate attention? Make time to tend to yourself with intimate attention. Ask yourself what you feel, what you long for, what you need.

If you find this difficult, join with others and write together. Share your stories in safe spaces. Bring your light. Here is my friend Eric doing just that.

3. Change your perspective

My twelve-year-old daughter and I like to go walking on ‘the tops’, along an ancient limestone escarpment in the hills not far from where we live in North Yorkshire. On some days, we have only the wind and the jackdaws for company. We can see the world spread out beneath us: fields stitched together with silver roads, a shimmering lake, an Iron Age hill fort rising from the woods. And the sun, always the sun burning through the clouds.

Whenever we’re up there, I watch my daughter’s face relax. I can feel the tension ebbing from my own body. From up there, everything else looks and feels very small and very unimportant.

Take some time to actively change your perspective on the world today. Look up. Look out of the window. Climb a hill. Ride on the top deck of the bus. Walk a different route. Crouch down and notice what is growing in the cracks between the paving stones.

Dear friends, I’m sending you love today and much light.

Sophie
XOXO

♥️ ♥️♥️ Join us for our next WRITE! Together – a celebration of love in all its forms. ♥️♥️♥️

✨Sat 15 Feb 2025 at 4pm GMT✨

Write a love poem to your writing. Write a love letter to yourself. Write a love poem to your lover. Fall in love with the page. Bring along your favourite love poem, if you’d like to read it to the group.

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See you there. x

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♥️

1. Lorde. ‘Poetry is not a Luxury’. In Your Silence Will Not Protect You. Silver Press.