Acknowledging Change
How are you changed, how are you changing, where is the passive and where is the active change? A Journal prompt.
Hello Readers and welcome to the first Notes from the Margin paid subscriber post.
We are sitting in a place of seasonal change in the northern hemisphere right now. I am watching the leaves begin to change on a daily basis, I find myself touching the acorns in their cups, the yellowing leaves of the willow, the seed heads and rose hips that line the hedges. I am noticing the way that the light is changing, how the air feels different, as though the world is turning over in bed and sleep is imminent. Even the clothes that people are wearing are changing: less shorts, more trousers, more hoodies, less T-shirts. Soon I will be forced to abandon my sandals and wear socks again. A sad day. I’m noticing, also, how these external changes are affecting me, my mood, my creativity; how I am starting to think about the colours I’ll wear in the autumn, the cosy meals I’ll cook. My mind keeps returning to an image of myself wearing long boots and jeans, crunching through woodland with the dog and just the idea of that experience; of stopping and listening to the fall of leaves in a wood, makes me feel more creative. Autumn is my most creative period, I think because it is a very peaceful time of year.
If I think about change in my own life, and there have been several big life changing incidents so far, I imagine my life as a series of events in which there are really two main types of change: change that happens to a person and change that a person instigates. The two go hand in hand sometimes: When my daughter died it changed my whole life, and my identity. But I made the decision to change from the work I was doing and pursue a career in the arts to absorb that change in my life and do something with it. I instigated change on the back of a change that happened to me. I’m sure you have done the same at points in your life. Life is really just a series of physics experiments in which we are acting and reacting to force applied to us.
I am a writer, I suspect you might be too, and we use the world and ourselves within that world to create. So how do we use these changes, these events to create, or rather, how do we translate those events into creative writing? What are the building blocks of mining your own experiences, of observing the world, how do you get to the creativity?
And how do you then, once you have created something, stop creating it. Where is the place at which you begin editing, or finish a piece of writing?