I am childfree and freelance and 48 (not 47 as it says in the intro if you’re reading this on email) and sometimes my days are unstructured as a result and sometimes I feel guilty about that. And sometimes I have no idea what to write to you and other times I have EVERYTHING to write to you.
Today is an EVERYTHING day. I want to write about what I think creativity means. I want to tell you about the electric feeling I had seeing the high up leaves of an ash tree, yellow and green, against a blue sky last weekend.
I want to tell you about a thing I heard recently about making sure you have juiciness in your day, so whatever happens you know that you have something planned that will make you feel like you. Maybe this juiciness is a square of 75% chocolate you eat on your own for five minutes, or a cup of barley cup (kind of like fake coffee you can drink all afternoon and not worry about).
It could be the frozen pizza dough you’re going to roll later, or the first episode of Hostage that someone recommended. Or a card you are going to write to a friend or a mini dance in your bedroom/kitchen, or a cheap and cheerful blusher you just bought. Whatever the day throws - and you can never know - these things can be juicy.
I want to write about how important it is not to override yourself for work or other people’s wants. To say ‘no’. To have boundaries. To be honest and tell your colleague that no, I am in a different time zone and 7.30pm calls no longer work for me.
I want to tell you about the newly-identified creative ‘part’ of myself, a glowing sparkling amorphous thing that I can actually see but cannot yet inhabit.
I want to say that some of my days have been unstructured lately and sometimes I feel bad about that. And I wonder: if I had kids, would I have more structure? And yes I would but that is not a reason to want them. And yes I know that if you do have children your days to a certain extent may be governed or structured by their needs and sometimes that is a joy and other times a frustration.
I want to say that today I have been to the doctor and walked down a twitten and through a wood near my childhood home, and walked with a friend through a wood near her home, and had lunch with my mother and put the washing away and had therapy (or ‘terrapin' as someone I know and love calls it!).
And sometimes I have days where I do ‘nothing,’ which today feels like, because I have not done jobs and been productive and made bread, or worked for money, and as I write I sit in a muddle, a muddle of vacuum-packed winter clothes, a pile of notebooks, birthday gifts to send, a travel sick paper bag full of information about Greece, some post-it notes with ideas for a novel, a new iPhone I have had for two weeks but not plugged in or whatever needs to happen to it.
I want to tell you about how I listened to a radio show where a man said the music he composes he feels is already ‘out there,’ he has to untangle wherever it is and there isn’t free will in that, it just seems to happen.
And I want to say that sometimes I feel something like that too, that there is a thing that I have in me somewhere that needs to go bleurgh on the page, to come out, to pour out, to be massive and unwieldly but is eventually to be gently massaged into shape like plasticine.
And other times I feel like I will never have anything to write to you again, or that if I do it has to be curated like the garden square outside my secondary school that I walked past earlier today, it has to be pruned and have a point and a message and a character arc and meaning and a conclusion that makes you hit ‘like,’ or ‘share’ or ‘comment’.
And this here and now writing is so far from curated but that’s almost the point, I never write anything that I don’t go back and edit and shape and mold a bit too firmly. And today I am doing that to see how it feels, and when did you last do something new and unlike you, simply to notice how it felt to do that?
I need the right references, the links, the photos (ooh I so want to show you my grandmother’s shirts, I have five multi-patterned shirts of hers that I want to put on one at a time, and take selfies of me wearing them so you can see what joy she found in clothes, not fancy ones mind but she had a knack of taking something and making it chic without trying).
But today I am not curating the shirts or the outfits or the pictures. Today I am writing whatever comes to my head and I may just press ‘send’ after this, even though it’s not my usual Sunday morning 7.43am scheduled newsletter. It’s a Thursday evening hello.
Hello in October, hello to October, you are nine days old and I have never seen such an abundant October. An acorn fell from a high branch in the woods today and hit me on the head, while others thudded around it. I have a brown shiny acorn on the desk here with me. And there is one in my kitchen that I may plant in my garden because why not?
And what is creativity, anyway? My terrapin asked me that about an hour ago. It’s thinking about things, anything differently, I said. Problem solving. What to do now to occupy a child, who needs something to do before he starts ‘creating,’ as my grandmother used to call it when a child cried! Oh the irony!
What else. Oh yes, creativity is sending off my grandmother’s chair to be re-covered with a tree fabric I found called Tatton Autumn - how appropriate. It’s only taken eight years to find the right fabric but that’s how I roll.
I love and adore furnishing fabrics, textiles, throws, mohair, wool. I rescued two wool jumpers from charity shops last year. I refurbished them: de-bobbled them, patched their elbows. One was a man’s XL cashmere jumper that looked like it had shrunk in the wash. I want to do a knitting course so I can knit mohair cardigans in fuzzy rainbow colours, I want to find secondhand coats in charity shops made of 100% Pure New Wool because they last.
Creativity is doing things that society doesn’t expect, or that the gods of marketing don’t want you to do. Wearing men’s clothes if you’re a woman (I’m serious. Go to the men’s section of M&S and there you will find classic jumpers, shirts, a pure lambswool crewneck for £40, things that never go out of style. Same with charity shops.) Going on Freecycle and finding a 30 year old fridge-freezer and keeping it working for nearly a decade (so far). Using your grandmother’s kitchen utensils for years, the oven trays and the towels and the whisks because they still work and because they were hers.
Apparently creative people need to look after the quantity of art they produce, while the great creator/god/God/the universe/the higher power/consciousness will look after the quality, according to a quote in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way book/course which I am currently undertaking. So yeah, today you’re getting the quality. Oops, I think I mean you’re getting the quantity.
Write it. Send it.
Write it. Send it.
Write it. Send it. This is some wise advice I received about writing my newsletter this week. JFDI, perhaps. (Just Fucking Do It.)
So I did.
Lucy, I love this so much. I had somehow missed it in my inbox before but my version of no-read week, which is time off phone and social media has brought me to it. Beautifully written, gripping and flowing. And wow your grandmother had incredible style! x x
A joy to read.
So glad you JFDI