Drawing the Chicken 17: On Returning
What does it mean to return? To creative work, or to home, or even to oneself?
This month, I began a 3 month sabbatical (ish) from teaching, trying to create more room in my life for my own artistic practices. The plan is to make real headway on my book, return to clay, learn a bit of digital art on my iPad (towards the dream of illustrating a children’s book I write in some future!), and generally find a little time to breathe and to be.
I also took a few weeks off to go see my brother and my four-month-old niece in Amsterdam. The plan was tools sneak off to write in a neighbourhood cafe for an hour or two every morning, but it turned out very few neighbourhood cafes in Amsterdam allow laptops (how does anyone get anything done there?!). So it ended up being more of a break than usual, or then I would ever probably let myself actually plan (did you notice the “ish” in the first line of the paragraph?), but something interesting came from it.
I wrote four poems, all roughly within the thematics of the third collection I’m working on (very sporadically). I wasn’t thinking about poems, wasn’t even reading poetry, and yet, a dream here, a tourist map there, a shard of an ancient bowl in a museum somewhere else, all led into poems I would never have thought to write otherwise. I found a rare cafe or library where I could write, but otherwise, I just scribbled on my phone on park benches.
And yet, poems. I’ve often spoken about how the discipline of showing up to page regularly can take one in writerly directions one may not have otherwise found, but this was the first time I deeply experienced the reverse — how sometimes, the freshest writing happens when you stop trying to write. It’s an equally important lesson in return.
Since coming back home to Delhi, I’ve been trying to figure out how to make the most of my sabbatical-ish quarter, not so much in terms of productivity as in terms of establishing creative routines that sustain me. One crucial first step has been to deep clean my pottery studio and begin returning to clay on a regular basis.
For me, the reason that pottery and writing go so well together is precisely because of how different they are — the physicality of one form against the cerebral-ness of the other. And nowhere is that more obvious than in the process of trying to return. Over the last 2 days, I have been deep cleaning my studio. Scrubbing mould off of spaces that got too humid this monsoon, sweeping and mopping floors, wet wiping surfaces that have been untouched for far too long, cleaning every tool, reorganising every glaze material. It is sweaty, dusty work, N-95 mask and frequent breaks notwithstanding. I would not venture to say that it is fun — not by any stretch of imagination. But it is satisfying watching the space come back together, prepare for my art.
It makes me think of how working with clay has inbuilt rituals for beginning and ending. Before you can begin work, you must wedge the clay, taking a few minutes to slowly, rhythmically enter the space of making. After you finish for the day, you must remember to cover everything up in plastic so it can dry slowly, and also to clean all your surfaces and tools. Bookended between these two organising rituals, the work of creating can take place.
As much as this cleaning stage demands from me, and as tiring as it is to have to do the deep clean born out of months of neglecting the studio, I cannot help wishing for a similarly physical ritual of returning to writing. Cleaning one’s desk isn’t the same thing— words can come elsewhere too, after all, and all types of other work calls also happen at the desk. There is no equivalent of a pottery wheel, a space where only pots get made, where preparing the space is the same as preparing to work.
This newsletter was to become one such ritual for me, a way of closing one writing week and opening another, preparing not a physical space but something in my brain that allows me to return to words a little more easily. I fell off that bandwagon for a while, but I’m going to try to return to the weekly, weekend format of writing to you all, hoping that that will take me back into myself as well.
Here’s to trying, then, and to returning, over and over and over.