5.7 Rebecca Beattie: ‘Rediscovering Nature’s Seasons & Cycles’
Welcome to series 5, episode 7 of the Prompted by Nature podcast. I hope you’re doing well and keeping warm if it’s as cold where you are as it is here. Well, it’s the final episode of 2022 and I’m very excited that this week’s guest is the one who will help us draw it to a close. i’ll be taking a short break but will be back to continue series 5 in the new year.
This week, I’m speaking with Dr Rebecca Beattie. Rebecca is a Wiccan Priestess with a PhD in Creative Writing, whose childhood growing up on Dartmoor gave her an early appreciation of the power and joys of nature. She has been practising solitary witchcraft for twenty years and an initiate of the Gardnerian Wiccan tradition for fifteen. She is acclaimed for her highly informed teaching of witchcraft subjects at Treadwell’s Books in Bloomsbury. By day she is a professional in a major charity, with advanced degrees in Literature and Creative Writing.
In this conversation we discuss:
Rebecca’s creative journey
How Rebecca found modern Paganism and how this led her to find her path as a Wiccan Priestess
‘Life as a Training Ground’
How Rebecca approaches creative blocks
How her ‘Wheel of the Year’ book came about and what makes it different
The connection between creativity and spirituality
Walking as an opportunity for stillness
What the wheel of the year is and how it can be used
The interfaith nature of the wheel
Storytelling as a learning tool
Rebecca’s early life living on Dartmoor and what drew her back there
Connecting to nature in an urban setting
Hiraeth is the word Rebecca uses to describe her feeling of homesickness
Rebecca’s tips for connecting with each festival
You can find Rebecca’s book, ‘Wheel of the Year: A Nurturing Guide to Rediscovering Nature's Seasons and Cycles’ is available at all good booksellers and in the Prompted by Nature bookshop over on bookshop.org (link in show notes). Remember to support your favourite indie bookshop by buying through them and then post a review on Amazon.
Some episodes that would go well with this one are:
1.10a Jini Reddy, Finding Magic in the Landscape
3.2a Stella Tomlinson, Priestesshood and Earth-Based Spirituality
4.11a Annabel Abbs, Walking into Creativity
4.12a Soraya Abdel-Hadi, ‘Finding my Creative Voice through Nature
As always, I’m on www.promptedbynature.co.uk and on the socials @prompted.by.nature on Insta and Facebook.
The writing prompt for this episode is available straight after this one if you want to use it to inspire your Winter Solstice celebrations.
Have a wonderful festive season, whatever you’re celebrating.
Happy listening and I’ll speak to you in 2023!
Helen x
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Welcome to your writing prompt for my conversation with Rebecca Beattie. Something Rebecca said really resonated with me while we were speaking and that was her approach to creative blocks. I’ve done episodes on creative blocks before (links below to previous episodes and blog posts on creative blocks if you want to have an explore) but I loved when she said ‘find where you’re not blocked.’
The idea of focusing on what is working rather than what isn’t, isn’t a new one but sometimes it can be so powerful to be reminded that blocks are a. not forever, and b. may not even exist at all. It all depends on your perception. The areas in which I personally feel most blocked when it comes to my creativity, and especially my writing, is in the actual action of creating. I have all the ideas and all the notebooks containing many, many fragments of these ideas, but I often struggle to actually sit down and start. I know for myself that I benefit from working with others in a writers’ circle, having a mentor or setting myself clear but small goals for anything I want to write.
You may not need this prompt right now, but I want you to bookmark it for the times when you might do in the future.
So, if you are feeling blocked creatively right now, I want you to do the following:
Firstly consider whereabouts you are blocked. Which part of the creative process feels hard for you right now? The beginning, the middle or the end? Is it approaching one particular piece of work? An article you want to submit, a poetry competition you’re trying to create something for, or writing anything at all down on the page? Only you will know how to answer that. For me, for example, I often feel blocked out of fear that what it is I want to create won’t be as good as I want it to be and that I’ll just let myself down and then be worse off than if I hadn’t started at all. I often compare myself to others, telling myself that they, whoever ‘they’ are, could do it better than I could so I shouldn’t even start?
Secondly, to help you find where you’re not blocked, just create anything. So, for me, that always seems to look like the morning pages, or some kind of stream of consciousness practice in which I just sit down, set my timer for thirty minutes, or tell myself I’m going to write just three pages in my notebook, and then start writing. For you, it might be that you would benefit from experimenting in an entirely different way. So, if you are a writer, do some doodling or painting, or play with clay. If you're a painter, do some writing or sculpting and so on. What about getting out into nature, collecting whatever natural objects, like pine cones or leaves, you can find and making some seasonal decorations. Sometimes we need to totally change our perspective to jolt our brains out of this blocked state and return to ‘manufacturer’s settings.’
Lastly, do this for as long as you need to before you return to your regular practice or that piece you have been working on and can’t get through. Perhaps return slowly and just create some small, manageable goals for yourself - one paragraph at a time, work on a different section of the story, poem, or piece you’ve been stuck on. Take it slowly and see what happens.
The idea is that you give yourself whatever time is available to you (and I realise if you’re up against a deadline, things can become pressing!) to move through whatever has been getting in your way.
As I say, you may not need this right now, but feel free to save it and come back to it whenever you need.
Happy creating,
Helen x
From the Blog:
Nature as a Medicine for Creative Blocks - link here
Silence as a Creative Tool - link here
Moving through Creative Blocks - link here
Previous episodes:
2.6b ‘Art as Play’ - link here (or find it on your usual podcast platform)
2.7 Recovering from Creative Exhaustion - link here (or find it on your usual podcast platform)
