This Distinction Changed My Creative Practice.

What I'm learning about the seasons and creative habits

Okay, hi.

I probably shouldn’t start with okay, right?

You’ll have to forgive me. I’m writing this sentence hidden in the laundry room at 6am on a Saturday.

It’s cold. The heater is revving up, and my shoulders are hovering just below my earlobes like a scarf.

I can’t complain. The coffee is hot and really this is my favorite time of day.

I’m a morning person through and through. It’s just…peeling myself out of bed before the resistance rolls in that sometimes gives me trouble.

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Yesterday morning, while working on this letter to you, I googled “spring solictice,” which demonstrates that I know nothing about anything (including how to spell). There is no spring solstice. Note: that’s how you spell it). And anyway, it’s an equinox. Duh, of course. I’m sometimes a real dummy. Let it be known.

My intention in googling was to try to understand why in the world we would set New Year’s resolutions in the cold of winter. I live in Texas, so maybe this doesn’t apply. But still the days are shorter. The mornings and nights are darker. The pull to lounge on the couch and slurp soup is much stronger.

So my intention in googling was to validate that pull. My intention was to bolster the hunch that goal setting in January is not seasonally aligned. Surely the collective inertia to go to the gym at 5am after the months of culturally endorsed overconsumption (read: the holidays) is the maniacal work of western civilization.

So, I scanned an article on Google Scholar called Solstice and Solar Position Observation in Australian Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Traditions.

Did you know I have half a PhD? Ha! Really! I quit after a year of nursing my second child during zoom night classes, but ya’ll - can I claim it?

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While I was doing my recreational research, my oldest daughter came downstairs, no pants, rubbing her eyes, and we shared a blanket on the couch while she read The Secret World of Plants and intermittently said “WOW, look at that!”

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I learned:

1. There is a field called cultural astronomy

2. It includes archaeoastronomy, the astronomical knowledge of ancient cultures and societies; AND ethnoastronomy, the astronomical knowledge of contemporary cultures and societies .

What a world! A person can say “I’m an archaeoastronomer,” when I stranger asks what they do at a party.

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Also —

From Celebrate the Solstice, Honoring the Earth’s Seasonal Rhythms through Festival and Ceremony by Richard Heinberg.

“In the context of our modern industrial civilization, the discussion of Solstice celebrations seems perhaps interesting from an antiquarian perspective, but otherwise inconsequential. When we adopt a broader historical and cross cultural vantage point, however, it is industrial civilization itself that appears strongly out of step.

and

Because nature within us is part of the same great pattern as the nature without, to begin the turn around from ravaged land to reverenced land the first step is to take time out to permit our inner patterns to re-align with the greatest beings — the sun and the atmosphere. — which give us our life here on Earth.

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So, here’s the thing: the modern calendar is of Roman origin, but unlike our present version, the early Romans celebrated the new year in MARCH, at the time of the spring equinox!!

I’m not sure what to tell you now. I guess, keep sipping your soup if you want to! Or, like me, you can sip your soup and go to the gym. But don’t be too hard on yourself, okay? You are nature. And this is the season of rest, quiet introspection, shedding, and conserving energy for what’s to come: warmer days, fresh blooms.

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This isn’t even what I meant to write about.

I meant to write about some revelations I’ve had in my creative practice recently. I’m reading The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp. One of America’s greatest choreographers.

In the book, Tharp discusses a concept she learned from Carl Kerenyi’s writing. The concept of bios v zoe. These words came from the ancient greeks and describe two competing natures.

Both bios and zoe mean life in Greek, but they aren’t synonyms. Bios is the greek root for biography and zoe is the root for zoology. Thwarp writes, “Zoe is like seeing earth from space.” It’s super zoomed out. “You get a sense of life on a rotating globe, but without a sense of the individual lives being lived on the planet.” Bios is more like “closing in on a scene, and seeing the details”

Thwarp argues that understanding where your own creative perspectives falls on the spectrum between bios and zoe can help you claim your creative identity and what you’re called to make.

She writes “If you understand the strands of your creative DNA you begin to see how they mutate into common threads in your work. You begin to see the story that you’re trying to tell; why you do the things you do (both positive and self destructive); where you are strong and where you are weak (which prevents a lot of false starts), and how you see the world and function in it.”

I found this thinking echoed in Rick Rubin’s book, too. He writes:

“We can expand our awareness and narrow it, experience it with our eyes open or closed. We can quiet our inside so we can perceive more on the outside, or quiet the outside so we can notice more of what’s happening inside. We can zoom in on something so closely it loses the features that make it what it appears to be, or zoom so far out it seems like something entirely new. The universe is only as large as our perception of it. When we cultivate our awareness, we are expanding the universe."

I’ve paid particular attention to my own tendencies of observation this week. I stay close to the details, collecting sensory data and then drawing it out into universal stories. If I stay entirely in one realm my work feels incomplete, like I’ve left too much up to the reader. To know this about myself has helped me to tune into when my writing is falling short of its potential.

Here’s some writing that came out of observing my own creative ethos this week.

It’s a morning in the life sorta thing.

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3 am: H crawled in bed. I curled up next to her. She whispered gibberish, yawned and fell back to sleep.

5:15: Alarm. Snooze

5:30: Snooze

5:45: Get up, gingerly. Do not wake H or the precious morning quiet will slip away. Pull my hair back. Throw on a sweater. Tiptoe downstairs. Pray the creaky floorboards don’t wake the baby as I pass his room. Jared and I kiss goodbye at the kitchen island. He is off to work.

I press the boil button on the tea kettle. Arrange the filter in the Chemex, grind the beans.

I filled the kettle the night before. I am grateful to past me for the forethought. It’s more methodical this way — more meditative, too. I could do it in my sleep. And mostly I still am asleep.

As the coffee brews the phone calls out to me. I silently repeat — avoid the phone avoid the phone, AVOID THE PHONE.

I do avoid by way of redirection.

I start packing school lunches.

Avoiding the phone is hard work. The best line of defense is to jump into another action. Start something and then another something will follow more easily.

Make the lunches. Unload the dishwasher. One domino mobilizing another.

I stand in front of the refrigerator, a UFO light blinding me in the darkness of the kitchen. It occurs to me we have no food. I cobble together two peanut butter sandwiches on Hawaiian rolls.

I’m unclear how we acquired the rolls. My husband must have bought them and I can’t understand why.

I slice two oranges that look strangely like lemons. Cheese. A granola bar. Zipppp. Lunches are done.

Time to start breakfast. The house is silent. So much nothingness to fill. A perfect space to fill with the synthetic something-ness of my phone.

AVOID THE PHONE, I repeat.

I pull a cutting board out of the drawer. I am cutting a bell pepper for my egg scramble. I am dicing 4 mushrooms.

The kitchen is no longer silent. It echoes with the sounds of cooking. The snap of a bell pepper, the scrape of the metal knife on the wooden board. I’m watching myself like an IG reel. All the sounds seem mic’d for ASMR optimization.

AVOID THE PHONE.

I apportion the eggs onto plates, each with butter toast and a cluster of berries. I pack mine in a Tupperware for later, to eat in the quiet of my car after drop off. Eli buckled in his carseat behind me.

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I can’t believe how often I am swallowed up entirely — subsumed — by a tiny square beaming blue light into my eyeballs.

I can’t believe how often I am looking to a stranger on the blue light device instead of the moon and the wind to guide me.

Just an aspiring cultural astronomer living in the modern world. Ya know?

Love ya,

Stephanie

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Btw: really thank you so much for reading! If you like these weekly newsletters, I have two asks! 1) Please click into Substack and like these essays/letter. Even better, leave a comment. Would love to chat with you there. See you super soon!