When Life Pulls You Away From Yourself

I’ve been thinking about why my creative practice matters so much to me, especially on days when life throws something in my path I didn’t see coming.

For me, writing, making, painting, stitching — whatever the vehicle is — brings me back to myself.

That might sound like a strange way to say it, but it’s the most honest way I know how to describe it.

There are days when I feel like I’m finally on a smoother road, and then suddenly I’m ducking, swerving, or jumping over something that landed in front of me. When that happens, my whole system can get pulled into the disruption. Even if I keep going, even if I handle what needs to be handled, something in me can still feel scattered by the end of the day.

If I don’t do something that brings me into direct contact with myself, I feel it all night. I can’t really rest. My mind keeps circling. My body stays unsettled.

So I write.

I write to remember what I know and to uncover what I may have forgotten while I was busy getting through the day.

Sometimes I make something. Sometimes I paint so I can hear more clearly what my body or subconscious is trying to show me. Sometimes it is thread through cloth, or scraps on the table, or a brush in my hand, or the simple feeling of my fingers moving across the keys.

The form changes, but the need is the same.

I have to do something that reminds me who I am.

When I say I use my body, I don’t mean anything complicated. Sometimes it’s as simple as pen to paper or feeling the keys of my computer under my fingers. My hands naturally move to the rhythm of my soul when I write. There’s less thought and more listening.

That’s the part that matters.

The listening.

Writing isn’t always something I do because I already know what I want to say.

Sometimes I write because I don’t know yet. I write because something in me is trying to find its way to the surface, and my hands seem to know how to follow it before my mind does.

Then I see the words on the page, and they become signposts.

They show me where I stepped slightly off my path. What I was blind to. They show me the small victories I might have missed because I was too busy getting through whatever life had placed in front of me.

And those small victories aren’t small to me.

My hands know the history that lives behind each one.

My hands know what it has taken to keep going.

They remember the patterns I’m trying not to repeat, and they recognize the moments that might look ordinary from the outside but aren’t ordinary to me at all. Because there has been a long lifetime beneath every stroke of my brush, every stitch I make and all of the words that flow from my fingers in an attempt to say what my heart and soul already know.

This is why creativity isn’t separate from how I live.

It’s not only about making something to share.

It’s one of the primary ways I stay in relationship with my own life.

That is the heart of Soul Woven for me.

Writing, art, cloth, symbol, and story are all ways of remembering who we are when life pulls us away from ourselves.

They aren’t separate practices. They’re different doors into the same remembering.

Sometimes writing is the door.

Sometimes painting is.

Sometimes it‘s cloth, thread, texture, color, or the rough edge of something stitched by hand. Sometimes it’s my body itself, asking me to slow down long enough to hear what I’ve been moving too fast to notice.

Even late in the evening, sitting in bed with my dogs curled beside me, setting my computer on my lap and letting my hands tell the story of the day helps me feel less alone, more connected, and more like myself again.

That is why I return to the practice.

Not because I need to produce something.

Because I need to hear myself.

Because I need to remember what the day tried to make me forget.

Because when my hands begin to move, some part of me begins to come home.

If this speaks to something in you, you’re welcome to follow the thread into the larger body of work.

Continue reading: When Everything is the Same But You're Not

Read another Reflection on life transitions: Not a Return to What Was