Practice Doesn’t Make Perfect, It Makes Possibility
It’s always the right time to return
Join us for tomorrow’s Worldbuilding Workshop happening at 12pm EST. This is workshop happening on the same day enrollment into the Seed A World Retreat closes. Inside this workshop we will locate your “Zone of Desire” using the “Element X” quadrant and I will share my framework for creating an income generating offer rooted in the erotics of your creative vision.
“Fear is excitement without breath” — Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt Therapy
As with any ecosystem there are seasons. In the past you may have heard me ask, “Are you seeding, deepening or returning to an interdisciplinary creative practice?”. Today, when I reflect on the seasonality of our creative ecosystems, I remember there is never a moment when we’re not returning. Last week in one of the discovery calls someone asked, “How do we stay committed inside our practice while not burning out?” I’m deeply paraphrasing here. They were already enrolled in the Seed A World Retreat but just wanted to check-in before the first day of class. And I’m so glad they did, I’ve been thinking about this question ever since. If you’re reading this, thank you. <3
This question reminds us we must always be returning to our creative practices, our spiritual practices, our breathwork; the practices that continue to expand our capacity to imagine, to dream, to create, to build worlds that make space for our breath. In tomorrow’s workshop, I will talk about my experience being a burnt out artist with a 9 to 5 who felt like they were too overwhelmed to even cultivate the capacity to imagine, let alone make the art. In 2018, I learned how to code and was hired by the same school who taught me. By 2019 I had worked my way up to landing the role of Lead Software Engineering Instructor. I mentored and worked closely alongside assistant teachers to create and deliver teaching strategies that simultaneously addressed the tenacious mindset learning how to code requires while ensuring our students were cultivating the skills they would need in their software engineering careers. I started at the campus in Brooklyn, NY which was specifically visioned for increasing access to tech careers for marginalized folks, in order to be accepted onto this campus you had to make under $40k a year. I later moved to the online education team where I supported busy single parents, disabled folks, and gender expansive learners who all talked about wanting to learn how to code because they were craving remote work before 2020 made it more common for some, certainly not all, workers. I loved the students more than the company I worked for and the stakes were high so I stayed. I over-extended myself regularly and dishonored the needs of my body almost daily. My mental health suffered, my friends wouldn’t hear from me for weeks, my romantic relationship ended.
In 2019 if you would’ve told me I would go from a burnt out artist, masking from 9 to 5 (on most days 8am-7pm), to working full-time as an artist and at a school rooted in black feminist imagination that, I created — a school that gives me the time, space and capacity to participate in an artist residency that culminates in a show where I get to exhibit my ceramic and printmaking practice alongside the works of other brilliant artists, a school that allows me to dream alongside artists I admire inside the world's first museum-led incubator for art, technology and design, and receive a sponsored invitation to attend a writer’s retreat1 to work on the Cykofa series in Point Reyes, California, which has hosted folks like Krista Tippett, Michael Pollan and Bryant Terry. In 2019, if you would’ve told me in four years all this and more would happen in one year, I would not have laughed in your face. I would have told you your sense of humor was cruel.
This is the power of returning. Whether it’s been years, months or weeks since you’ve released work or visited the altar of your creative practice, it’s always the right time to return. Returning to our way of knowing, being and breathing reminds us of the possibility always available to us inside the non-linear loop of creative practice. If fear is excitement without breath, love lets the oxygen in. This radical self-love makes burn out much more difficult to take hold and easier to spot before it begins. Returning to desire is a practice of recharge, not depletion. Inside our breathwork, the spacious possibility that creative practice cultivates, we get to create worlds that nurture our wholeness and attract resources, relationships and opportunities we couldn’t imagine would find their way to us. But first, we must find our way back to ourselves…
Over and
Over and
Over again.
See you tomorrow.
With desire,
Ayana
This writing retreat invitation was made possible by Panta Rhea’s Flow Fund, the fiscal sponsorship of Studio Two Three and the unwavering black feminist love, support and witnessing of Ashara Ekundayo. Thank you, thank you, truly, thank you.