Tending the Compost: Back to Creative Basics

I generally don’t make new year’s resolutions but for a few years now, I’ve had a ‘word for the year’ that inspires the direction of the next 12 months.  I usually work on finding a word around the solstice and then any clear intentions that come from that I put in writing on the late-January new moon.  This means I’m not beholden to society’s take on when and how I should set goals for myself but am working more closely with what inspires me more - the seasons and the moon.  I’ve been doing this for the past decade or so, perhaps a little more, and so far it’s worked well.  

My word for this year is ‘consistency’ and this applies not only to my writing and desire to finally write a book but to my creativity as a whole.  It’s a commitment that, if I say I’d like to do something, and care enough to start envisioning how this will look, I’ll actually follow through on that by carving out time to write and create, and making this time sacred and protected.  I am a writer and it’s about time I make good on the promise I make myself every time I tell myself that.  I’ve been published a few times, and I want to build on this in a more consistent way rather than constantly starting things and not finishing them because life gets in the way.

I spend a lot of time working for free on projects such as Benfield Valley Project and Parents For Future, often to the detriment of my writing practice.  Now, I don’t intend on stopping these things altogether but where I would previously have done these tasks first, irrespective of the time I’d put aside to write, they will instead work around my day job and my writing practice. 

I was ill for most of the holiday break this year and so spent some time listening to, and reading, a writer called Steven Pressfield, who wrote The War of Art.  In his work, he talks about putting your arse (or in his accent ‘ass’!) where your heart is.  For me, this means that even if I have nothing I’m working on in particular, I’m still getting my bum on the chair and writing.  If I tell myself I’ll write for an hour straight after I’ve dropped the kids off at school on my day off, then that’s what I’ll do.  Unless it’s urgent, everything else can wait.  I often get frustrated because I tell myself I want to write and that I love to write but then what I’ve realised is essentially the fear of the blank page gets in the way and I don’t do it.  

I had my astrological chart read a few months ago - I’ve been wanting to do it for years but have never got round to it - and one of the things that the astrologer said (her name’s Mary English, if you’re into that stuff, and she’s amazing) was that I shouldn’t let my Virgo moon run the show when it came to my creative work.  I didn’t need to be told that, with a Virgo moon placement, everything has to be ‘just so’ - I’ve been crippled by this need for perfection for years, and really, it’s the thing that has a stranglehold over what it is I want to create; it’s the thing that stops me from starting because well, if I don’t start, if can’t be crap.  She also said that one of my placements (I can’t remember which one now - something about Neptune maybe…?) means that everything I do has to help in some way, to have meaning and a ‘bigger’ purpose, and that this is what drives me.  Again - and as is often the case with astrology - I already knew this; I pretty much don’t start anything if I don’t think it has some kind of purpose or that it won’t help anyone.  With that, I acknowledge my own need to be aware of ‘saviourism’, though I think my Virgo moon tends to keep anything like this in check as she’s just always telling me I’m not doing enough and anything I do do doesn’t make a blind bit of difference anyway!  But if I’m telling people that their words make a difference, then I guess I’d better start believing that mine do too and, moreover, that I can be that person that my own words help.

But what I’ve realised recently, to my horror, is that my desire to write and create has somehow, unknowingly, become dictated by some urge to only do it if it’s littered with pithy statements or aphorisms that could be pulled out and quoted on Instagram; to only speak if I think it’s what people want to hear, if I think it sounds ‘clever’ enough to be read.  But I’m not an academic.  I’d love to be but, truthfully, I’ve always struggled with academia….plus Masters and PhD’s cost a lot of money, so I read and I write.  And that’s the most important thing.  If I am a writer then I write.  It doesn’t matter how this looks as a practice and it’s certainly not, or shouldn’t be, open to the views of what I think others think I should be doing.  What matters is that I am using this medium to speak about the things that matter to me, to create work that helps me to make sense of the world and that could somehow help to underpin what the future might look like, both macro and micro.  

I’ve long thought about art and its capacity to drown out the hate, to saturate our worlds (real, energetic and virtual) with visions of a future that’s not too far away but the reality of which feels as if it’s still tightly locked up in a box marked, ‘do not touch.’ Humans are hugely intelligent creatures and each one of us has all the answers if we piece them together but we are constantly distracted by sparkling lights and terrible journalism.  We all hold a piece of the jigsaw but have been led to believe we’re not important enough to make that much of a difference. 

But all of this doubt, indifference, fear, can be used as compost for our creativity.  I can take all the hate that I see and read, all of the doubt that I feel when I think about sitting down and writing something, stick it in a dark bin for a while and let the worms get to work.  In the way that nature so beautifully turns waste and filth into the black gold of a mulch rich enough to nourish the seeds of new life, so too can it become fertiliser for seedlings of creativity, that will go some way to transforming the filth spewed from those who can’t see past their own fear of the ‘other’ - whatever or whoever that ‘other’ may be - into something more constructive, more collaborative.  

For me, this is where consistency comes in.  Consistency is a reminder to myself that things won’t always look ‘perfect’ or even close to it, and that perfection is fallacy anyway.  It is a reminder to myself that nature doesn’t need conditions to be perfect to create something from nothing.  A seed will always try to find the light, no matter how much rubbish it is buried beneath.  When we cleared the fly-tipped areas of the Benfield Valley last year, we found arum lilies desperately trying to find a way out and up towards the sun.  They were white and malnourished but they were there, still trying to grow.  Consistency is a way of slowly clearing away the stifling debris of doubt, indifference and fear.  It’s showing up each day and removing it piece by piece.  Creativity is the soil and it needs to breathe in order to flourish.  And if doubt, indifference and fear is my compost and my creativity is the soil, then my words are the seeds that will grow to become the wildflowers bending to kiss the breeze on a midsummer’s day.  All can work as one.  But tending to the compost is where it starts; what turns this waste into fertiliser is time and in turn, by noticing where the doubt, indifference and fear resides, I am giving it the attention it needs to become something else, to transform and morph into something infinitely more nourishing and life-giving.  

So my question to you is, what is it that you need to compost in order to move forward?  What needs to become the mulch that will help you to bring forth something beautiful - not perfect, nothing is - beautiful because it’s seeded from you and by you?

Happy new day, new month, new moon, new year, my friend.

Helen x