It’s been a while. Like a lot of people, I found writing incredibly difficult in the last year, and what I did write was more private processing than blog-worthy and interesting. Also like many of us, I have had an intermittently hard time giving myself grace when it felt like I was ignoring my writer-identity, but I am trying hard to recognize that what I made in the last year was no less valuable than a poem or a story. When I did have a creative impulse, I picked up my flute, stitched a Christmas stocking, or made a box fort with my toddler.

And it turns out that there’s a poem in all that, too. I’m still working on it.

Poet and potter M.C. Richards says it better:

The creative spirit creates with whatever materials are present. With food, with children, with building blocks, with speech, with thoughts, with pigment, with an umbrella, or a wineglass, or a torch. We are not craftsmen only during studio hours. Any more than a man is wise only in his library. Or devout only in church. The material is not the sign of the creative feeling for life: of the warmth and sympathy and reverence which foster being; techniques are not the sign; “art” is not the sign. The sign is the light that dwells within the act, whatever its nature or its medium.

Read more about her at the ever-brilliant Brain Pickings here.

For other really interesting reads, check out this really cool essay about the way the King Arthur legend is a collection of reinventions that invites further reinvention, by Tracy Deonn. I’ve always been drawn to the many variations of Arthuriana, and clearly I’m going to have to read her book too.