Dear reader,
It seems I've been avoiding my book project. I get easily caught up in the seeming importance of other things. Cooking and cleaning, balancing day jobs, numbing out my existential crises with Netflix.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés calls me out:
"Negative psychological complexes rear up and question your worth, your intention, your sincerity, and your talent. They also send exhortations that assert unequivocally that you must labor to "earn a living" doing things that exhaust you, leave you no time to create, destroying your will to imagine...
"A woman must be careful not to allow over-responsibility (or over-respectability) to steal her necessary creative rests, riffs, and raptures. She simply must put her foot down and say no to half of what she believes she "should" be doing."
I resonate with this and I struggle, too. My book, feeble and far from finished, has received surprising support thus far. It was a finalist for the Writers League of Texas Manuscript Contest in Memoir. A few agents have reached out with interest. Yet each time I try to find time to write it, a part of me screams no!!! Why are you wasting time on this frivolity? You are not yet stable enough. You have not yet figured out your career. You are not yet earning enough to help support your family.
When I drop into my body to ask, how do you feel towards your project…?
I receive a dull ache in my chest - a sadness. A distance. The pulse of the project, once beating loud, is now so minute I can barely register it. Everything else is drowning it out.
Last Saturday was the first Creative Common Room.
I created this offering for others, but it ended up being a gift to myself. As I sat in the warmth, vulnerability, and kindness of other creatives, I dipped back into my book project. Some words were embarrassingly bad, yes, but some held a glint of magic. Some reminded me why I started this book in the first place.
In 2020, night after night, I was haunted by dreams of a river.
My waking self didn’t know which river it was, or where in reality I could find it. But my dreaming self knew the river more than my waking self had ever known anything. I knew its temperament, quirks, and codependency with the rain. I knew which banks are muddy, which are rocky, and where to launch a kayak. I could direct fishermen and women to which eddies the fish hid behind, and which fish the river homed.
I didn’t know where to find that dream-self in the waking world.
She was at peace, I inferred. She wore galoshes, trudged fearless through mud, and owned only enough clothes for the week. The landscape became a part of her very stature. She felt a sense of belonging derived from a land-connection that was instinctual and a relationship that was developed, grown, and tended to over years of patient conversation.
The Wild Woman visited me in Río Abajo Río, through my dreams, to remind me of my origins.
Your intuition knows, she encouraged me. You are of the Earth, meant to live in it, with it, for it. That dream self, I know, was the same one I found naked by the fire. She is a part of me, and I her.
Cliché or not, my dreams of the river prompted me to write.
I am reaching to the Wild Woman now to call me back.
How are you, reader? How do you feel towards your creative projects? Where have you met your Wild One?
Will you join me tomorrow at 9am Central Time for the next Creative Common Room?
We will commune with our wildest selves and create as if our life depended on it.
With love,
A
www.annaadami.com
IG: aadami_writing