Creative Ritual – Part I

It is January and I begin again. A year ago, I was less than a month into my writing MFA, and the drive that carried me in my practice carried me still. Now, it’s waned, a moon grown tired and collapsing back in. My practice feels tenuous, my routines lacking. A wintering, in a way, and I feel like a barren tree looking out, remembering when it was so easy to grow. 

At our most recent writing residency at the ACA, I took a class with poet Gabrielle Civil, and I was endlessly captivated by her easy charm, the way she gave herself permission to be in her body, comfortable and home. We’d begin class with movement, meditative and connected, then into prompts to journal in this back-and-forth flow. Her class was on lineage, taking our daily lessons and connecting to our roots through text and writing, but so many of is felt inspired in our practice, our ritual. At the way we enter our work as something meaningful and worthy of our time and attention. 

Sacred– regarded with reverence and respect; what do you hold in this way? In a society of consumption, of exhaustion and depletion, what do you refuse to break, to eat away at? 

I begin again. I have not treated my creative practice as something sacred, instead letting it fall like leaves. It is not easy to come out of a winter, but I am not a dead thing. I can call back into my muscle memory, into my ancestral memory, into my imagination to make something new of myself again. To make my self my self, again. 

Here is my creative ritual. 

My writing desk is in my bedroom, pressed against the far wall with an outline of my novel chapters tacked above, a visual marker for my progress. I keep a candle nearby, my headphones, my editing books shelved below me. I start by cleaning the room. It’s one room, one space that I can remake into a state of readiness, of resolved completeness. When I place the headphones over my ears, the outside world closes. This time is sacred. I breathe, I dance, I meditate, I come back into myself. And then I begin writing. 

This is the way I respect my work. I show up for it. I attend to it as though it truly matters. And I leave the work of the day with a sense of reclaiming a bit of my soul. 

And it’s not a logical thing for me, though it may be for you. The ritual is personal and a living thing. I add and takeaway elements as they feel right or wrong in my body. But recently I read parts of Atomic Habits by James Clear with my students, and much of the psychology of habit lies in my rituals, a time where science and soul reflect each other. 

Our identity, for example, shapes our behaviors, how we show up in the world. If I see myself as someone serious, a writer without an asterisk, my actions should follow it in my process. And every time an action of mine demonstrates that identity, I am proving it back to myself in a feedback loop. 

I think I am, therefore, I am. I act this way, so it must be true. 

Is there something in your life that deserves to be treated as sacred, something perhaps you’ve let winter? Whether it is your connections with friends or family, time for your passions, or even solitude, consider the part of your identity this ritual is connected to. How do you come back to that person again? 

 I think I am a serious writer dedicated to my practice, therefore I am. I act by honoring the ritual of my writing practice, by giving it space and time to be, and so I take it seriously.

I begin again.

Happy January–May it be kind to you in a world, in a time that can be cruel. May you be kind to yourself.

-Courtney