What if I Could Write Anywhere?

Tending to my art in new ways

Substack and I are about to have our two-year anniversary. As the calendar changes this weekend, I feel myself getting amped. Fall is my jam. September has always been a month that rebirths and energizes parts of me. Maybe it’s that back-to-school vibe. A fresh start that revs up my creativity. Harvest season. Whatever it is, I feel it again now. So, I’m showing up this week with just a little glimpse into what I want to do next here.

I also want to talk about what happens to our art when we slow down and take breaks. I gave myself permission to step back and not churn out weekly essays this past summer. I worried my creativity would go dry. That my writerly heart would turn arid and barren and that I’d be lost as to how/where to start again.

The opposite happened. I have so many ideas as to where I want to go with my words. More than anything - what happened is I came to a realization that I can write anywhere. That I need not be in a seat tapping on the keyboard. Willing myself to spit out word counts or dedicate X amount of time writing. When I removed the self-imposed constraints, I was met with the freedom to roam. I let my mind meander and rest and reboot. You know how when your cell phone is acting cloggy and sluggish and you realize, oh, wait. When was the last time I shut this thing off completely? So, you do and then when you power it back up, the screen seems to pop more. It moves at lightning speed again. Crisper and sharper.

I think I turned myself off this summer to turn myself back on.

Late in 2024, I listened to an episode of Tim Ferris’ podcast with David Whyte as a guest. The very first clip of the episode is a snippet where David recounts his realization that he could "write anywhere" which led to a highly prolific and freeing period of creation. The whole episode is a treasure (as David always is!) but even if you just click on the start of it to hear David recount this in 36 seconds, you’ll be happy you did.

“The number of restrictions I put on myself over “what I need” to write (I need silence, I need quiet). Then the realization, what if I could write everywhere? Anywhere?”

David Whyte

This idea stayed with me and must have planted something in me.

Perhaps I was in my pre-harvest this summer in stepping out of my posting posture. I think of

Alex Elle

’s words in one of her recent essays:

It’s okay to step back and let the soil do what it does best. Let your body integrate the lessons you’ve learned. Let your spirit exhale. Let joy, pleasure, and simple living take up space again. Coming up for air doesn’t mean you’re ignoring what still needs to be addressed. It simply means you’re acknowledging that you are more than just your healing process. You are a whole person, not just a project.

Writing to myself and writing to you is a crucial part of my healing process. And I’m learning to trust that this can go slowly. Time is not slipping through my hands. That is just what we tell ourselves. What our world seeps us in. Scarcity sanctity. It’s not true.

When I stopped churning out words on the conveyor belt of “Must stay relevant. Must post weekly” what happened was I was still creating. Only it was for an audience of one. Me. When I was the lucky recipient of my own gifts, something deep in me expanded.

It felt like creating only for the sake of creating. Nothing more. I don’t know that I’ve ever done that consistently. Shown up for only me with not an inkling of external performance. I didn’t know I knew how to do that.

I showed up for that little girl inside me who always believed she needed praise to feel worthy enough to step into the arena.

A practice I picked up that I believe is feeding my creative heart is my own version of nature’s writing. On my morning walks this summer I began picking up rocks I find on the trails. Just ones that grab my eye. I’ll hold the rock in my hand and rub it as I walk. Almost like a rosary bead. I say my prayer as I track the trail. I rub the stone and mediate while moving.

I brought these rocks home and started placing them in a bowl. I picked up some of my daughter’s markers and decided to write my simple prayers or words of peace on them. A collection is starting. I left some blank thinking maybe I’ll paint some.

You could say in turning the stones over, I found a truer voice. A more playful one. One closer to my original voice.

These are becoming my own tarots. I pull a stone each day. I pull from the ground to ground me.

This is the one I pick up daily. I drop some dōTERRA on my palms, rub my hands together, place my face in the hammock of my palms, deep breath in and then pick up this stone and empty it out. My 3-part prayer.

I wasn’t going to share this here until recently when I had a nudge to let this side out. I was always such a shy kid and I’m honoring her now. No need to hide this, Allison. This can be both. Private sacred prayer and an invitation to others to consider their own version of this. Isn’t that why we are here? To inspire ourselves and each other?

As I return to regularly posting essay, I do worry that this new energy that found its way into me will slowly dissipate. Or that those self-imposed restrictions I once clung to will find their way back into my psyche.

And then I remember why I started showing up here in the first place. It has become The Product of a Promise The promise to show up and pour out the words etched inside of me. After years of only keeping them in, I pour them out.

DARE TO BE DRY is the product of a practice of showing up. It’s the product of a practice of me cracking my heart open and letting words fall out. Words that I craft into something each week.

This newsletter is the product of a practice of me keeping one promise that I made to myself. It is a practice of believing that this promise will be mean something.

What I’ve learned is that it does take practice to keep promises to myself, especially when life gets noisy and busy and distracting. The practice feels especially heavy when other things glare at me urgently.

While consistently showing up to the blank page, something was planted in me that wants to sprout and break through the topsoil, insisting the sun reach it.

When you practice showing up to your promise, there is power underneath the promise. I can tell you right now as I type these words, what this feels like is me co-signing internal trust. This is me vetting my younger self who shows up to say, “remember how I told you this is what you wanted.”

So, I’m here, amped up for fall’s energy. Ready to come back at it with fresh essays. I also have to admit that there’s a part of me that is worried that this will start to feel obligatory. Because in these past two years some weeks it has felt that way. And I know that forced energy is antithetical to creativity and to fostering art. With that in mind, I am double clicking on and tethering myself to what has always been consistent here in this space -community.

Just last week, for instance, after posting this essay about leaving my first-born son at college and all the tangled emotions that lay in the wake of that,

Amy Brown

shared in the comments her own similar experience. In part she said, “I understand the grief so well; felt it as I took my eldest off to college, our sudden table of three where there was once four, my youngest daughter half-joking about all the parental attention foisted her way until we learned to give her and us space to adjust to the new balance, the triangle instead of the square. But it was such an odd and mournful feeling at first, like missing a limb.”

The triangle instead of the square. The adjusting to this new way of balancing our days and our ways. I can’t tell you how much that analogy, those words shared by Amy, soothed me since reading them. Her words encapsulated the paradigm shift of my family’s structure. My hard to verbalize feelings so simply yet profoundly analogized into shapes of before and after. How it clicked something into place for me.

So, it is in this spirit that I return to regularly writing and sharing essays. The spirit of relational reading and resonance. The community I find in the comments section of my work and in others.

Beginning next week, DARE TO BE will have monthly themes. With September being national recovery month, the theme I am choosing to write about in September is awe. For me, simply put, my sobriety journey continues to pluck me and drop me into awe-soaked moments. Most of them would be deemed ordinary and mundane. But I am learning that the extraordinary is in the ordinary.

I will be collaborating with Jennifer Bridgman who writes

The Mess + The Magic

. We are working on a joint essay about how awe finds us in myriad ways. And I hope to continue to collaborate with other writers here because, well, community. Because my words want to walk with other words.

For my Paid Subscribers, my immense gratitude to you. I want us to do more together. There will be additional opportunities to connect on the monthly themes. We’ll utilize the paid chat feature, hop on a Zoom call every now and again. I am also rolling around in some ideas to incorporate monthly challenges - lighthearted ways to keep the themes close to us in our everyday lives.

If you’ve been reading along as a Subscriber here at DARE TO BE, thank you. I am so glad you are here. If you think you might like to try on a deeper dive with me, and upgrade your subscription, I’d love to have you along for the longer ride. If you are just visiting and want to receive my essays on a more regular basis, join in. The button below will accomplish either scenario.

LET’S TALK ABOUT IT:

• Have you ever had a period of internal growth only by slowing down. By quieting down?

• Let’s brainstorm together. Tell me some themes you think would be fun to read about. To talk about. To get curious about.