You don't have to be a hermit to be a writer.

The demands of life and creativity are not separate things.

The last week has been full of travel and family and learning and an important election and my ability to be still enough to create has fallen aside.  It’s been busy! I had some distant-living family too close to miss delivering some hugs to.  We welcomed a new baby into the family and another member went through open heart surgery within a couple of days!  Everyone is doing great and recovery and adjustment is the dominant flavour ahead for the next while.

But it got me to thinking about how we think about our creativity falling aside to life.  The way we feel guilty about it like the two have nothing to do with each other.  The “life” stuff totally informs the creation.  It’s what makes our voices and perspectives interesting and unique.  It increases our empathy for our fellow humans going through their own things.  It’s all part of the soil that we are, sometimes drained or dry, sometimes fertile and fruitful, sometimes everything at once.

I think maybe it’s such a modern way of thinking to keep your creativity as outside of life.  It makes it something that is only available to the privileged who have time to separate from life.  The Thoreau in the woods with his mom bringing him food.  Virginia Woolf with a room of her own to slide away to.  When I imagine our medieval makers I imagine creations amidst life and trying to sustain it.  Wandering livestock to be dealt with, unexpected weather to protect from, children arriving and elders departing and still things were made and learned and stories told and songs sung.

It’s really our monks who bring this idea of hermitage to seek enlightenment.  The act of distilling oneself to be able to get closer to their god.  To take oneself away from the people and living like the gods weren’t present there too.  I find this need for the special circumstances so disturbing now and I see how much it gets in the way and stops people from making, learning, and creating because they feel like they have to achieve the right conditions first.

The more I think about our character Erna finding her way into the midst of a people who have not subscribed to this monastic way of thinking, the more I can see the opportunity in their interactions to investigate those thoughts and remember we didn’t always believe it had to be special to make things or be amongst our gods.

That’s where I’ve gotten to this week.

May your family be blessed with good tidings this week too.

Have a great weekend.

Susie