Waking Up and Low Stakes Creativity 🖋 Alongside Letters
Hello friends,
It's been a while, hasn't it? You may have joined this list in the beginning, or you may have joined in the past 8 months and not received a single email. Either way, welcome. Here's a story about coming out of hibernation and starting something kinda new here.
If you’re a writer (or really, an artist of any sort) you know the terror of the blank page. The blinking cursor. The fancy new journal you bought with good intentions. The crisp white sheets of loose leaf, or the cracking spine of a fresh composition book. So full of possibility, so likely to say nothing. As a collector of half filled notebooks and abandoned writing habits, I would know.
A week or so ago, after another disappointing dip into social media, I found myself wandering around the house writing a poem in my head. It was a rambling complaint, specifically to the particular corners of Twitter I frequent, and it was going to end with a stirring call to beauty. To speak the things that are bringing you life, to admit the limits of your knowledge, to share the ways you’re coming awake. It wasn’t very good, but it felt good to say it in my head.
Then I sat down at my computer and - poof - it evaporated.
That’s how I feel when I sit down to write one of these email letters. I have a million things I’d like to say, but they disappear. And social media? Well, by the time I process my thoughts about something that’s happening in the world and write my way into knowing what I think, everyone else has moved on.
So, I’ll never be an influencer or a thought leader. It’s cool. I don’t like that much attention anyway.
***
Here’s what I do like: conversations about the things that matter. Not just big things, like spirituality and current events and culture. Small things too, like successfully knitting a scarf, or a delicious coffee drink, or a magical turn of phrase in a poem, or the astonishing moment when spring turns the corner and the trees are blooming again.
(they make my face hurt with allergies, but good Lord isn’t it beautiful?)
I like to explore the mystery of prayer. I like to sit in listening silence and make room to hear stories. I’m much more interested in the movement of Spirit in and between us than intellectualizing and categorizing. I’m interested in plumbing the depths, surfacing with treasure, and spending it all on repairing the world.
I like to ponder the big things too — politics and theology, the two inescapable things that people in my circles seem to talk about all the time. But I hold those things in the quiet. The truth is I’m just scared of being wrong and being separated from fellow humans.
All of this, plus the general malaise of living through a pandemic, has made writing very hard. But it is spring, and the sun is shining, and I feel myself slowly crawling out of hibernation. In the quiet of my own days, I’ve been reading novels and comics, playing around with hand lettering, keeping a reading journal (not a full on bullet journal, my brain doesn’t work like that), and learning how to make bomb Aeropress coffee at home. I call these acts of low stakes creativity, things I do for nothing but my own delight.
Slowly, in the past month or two, I’ve sensed an invitation to come back to the world, but how do you do that when you’re so out of practice?
***
In the latest iteration of this email list, I’m turning to an act of low-stakes creativity. I’d like to turn toward the old-fashioned art of letter writing. Okay, technically these are open letters to the 100ish folks who signed up for this list, but I hope that maybe they will become a correspondence too.
Every other Saturday, I want to open up my laptop, and just tell you about what’s going on. Right now, I’m going to to say 4-6 months and see how it goes. Honestly, that was my original intention for this email list, but well, I ended up pressuring myself to say something *profound* every month. As I start over, I do not promise profundity or well-crafted essays here.
One week it might be a deep thing I've been wondering about, and the next it might be a story about my dog. But it all matters, and it's all part of a life that refuses to be just one thing. The point of letter-writing is to know a person, after all.
And here's the invitation for you: I’d like you to write back. Doesn’t matter what you write back about. Respond to something I said. Ask clarifying questions. Tell me something you’ve been delighting in or something you’ve been struggling with.
So much of writing for the public internet feels like a monologue. I’d like to try an experiment in conversation. Let’s come alongside each other and decide together what matters in this space.
If you’ve known me for a while, you know I care about these things — poetry, books, coffee, Jesus, the mystery of faith, the mystery of doubt, the contemplative life, loving well, peacemaking, seasons and nature, creativity, and doing our part to heal the world. And I love to hear stories, hear about the ways you’ve noticed God moving in your world.
I’m curious what would unfold if I just open a document, write some words without obsessing over quality, and sending them out, like that little “noiseless patient spider” Whitman wrote about, flinging threads and hoping something will catch.
Here’s the first thread. For the next 6 months or so, I’m calling this Alongside Letters.
Care to join me?
~Jen
A Question for You
Hit reply and send me your answer!
Have you take up any acts of "low stakes creativity" over the past year? By that I mean something small that you're doing for fun, not for an audience or a side hustle, but as a small act of life-giving creativity.
Writing Elsewhere
Some links to recent writing...
Some entries for She Reads Truth's Kingdom of God study plan, God's Kingdom Come and The Kingdom is Coming
A Rabbit Room interview with Rachel Wilhelm on her gorgeous new album Requiem