Dear Tiffany,
Lately you’ve been daydreaming a lot about a few specific past experiences.
– The round glass-topped patio table in the backyard on 35th Ave. Going outside with a ‘fancy’ breakfast of fresh-picked raspberries and other fruit and juice and, most importantly, your journal.
– The Starbucks on Centre Street, where you ordered a hazelnut steamer once a week for almost a year on your The Artist’s Way dates, again with your journal, and sometimes with a sketchbook. (Yes! Truly!)
– The little fold-down table in your bright-blue bedroom, again with the journal. And also all the rituals down there. New Year’s Eves and birthdays and full moons and new moons and endings and beginnings.
There’s a theme in all this nostalgia. Time alone. Ritualized time. Time to write, in ways and about topics not meant to be shared. Unproductive time. Down time. Creative time. Alone time.
Ritualized solo creative time.
You have been making time for that since you were a teenager.
You have always craved that kind of time, alone with yourself and some blank paper and a warm beverage and maybe some candles and often some magic.
You have been slowly collecting, over the last couple years, what is now a full shelf of books on the topic of ritual. You haven’t read any of them.
You have been daydreaming so much about these lost rituals.
For a long time you’ve framed The Problem as your inability to relax. You need to relax. You need to relearn the art of relaxation. And it’s true, you do.
But I think that maybe also, maybe even more so, you need to get those rituals back.
Ritualized solo creative time.
I have no idea where we will carve out the space for that, but it feels important. It feels like homesickness, this nostalgia. Not for any of those tables but for yourself sitting down to them.
Make some space, make some time, make some magic.
Love,
Me