Drawing the Chicken 9: On Windows

"And what is more generous than a window?" - Pat Schneider

This may not be the direction in which you saw this newsletter going, but this week, I cannot stop thinking about how central windows are to my creative process— and to my general wellbeing!

Let me backtrack. I think I first discovered the window as central to my creative work while at the Akademie Schloss Solitude residency in Germany in 2018. The studio apartment where I spent 6 months did not have much to look at indoors— wooden floor, and everything else in stark black and white — but it did have two huge windows. Those six months were the most solitary of my life, for better and for worse, and I ate almost every meal sitting on the window ledge, looking out, watching the seasons change from the frigid January when I arrived to the long summery June when I left. The window ledges were high and narrow, not the most comfortable of seating, but I squeezed myself onto them, and somehow, they enabled just the kind of daydreaming I needed in order to function creatively.

My birthday came towards the end of my time in Germany, and my mother asked me what she could get me as a birthday gift. The answer was clear: Could she help me build a window seat in my room back home in Delhi? My mother is an architect, and my house is a wonderful, weird old house that always seems to say “yes” to all our ideas, offering u a crevice here or a corner there that can be easily adapted. So by the time I moved home, one of the windows in my bedroom had been moved a foot and a half outwards, and there I had it, my little cubby hole of a window seat. I brought myself a Turkish mosaic lamp for the ceiling and lots of colourful cushions, and I had myself a little corner of safety (which, incidentally, both of my cats absolutely adore and will fight me for!).

Years later, when we remodelled our kitchen, I managed to squeeze in a lovely window seat there as well, a place to pause and stare outdoors while the food is cooking on the stove, or to have a cup of tea in the mornings. It’s easily everyone’s favourite corner of the house now, and it makes me wonder why so many people face their chairs away from the windows, why we tend usually to shut the world out every time we sit down.

At Hedgebrook this year, I was delighted to learn that every cottage is equipped with a sleeping loft, a desk, an overstuffed armchair by the fireplace and a huge window seat. I felt so seen! I spent the better part of my residency curled up in this window seat, reading, writing, sipping tea, and just staring at those gorgeous pine trees outside, sometimes finding a big barned owl staring back! I decorated the ledge by my window seat with flowers and sand dollars, and it became my truest home in the cabin.

So, what is is about windows? Turns out there’s a fair bit of research on how staring out of windows is really good for your brain (see here and here and here, for starters)— a moment to pause, a moment to connect with the sky, a moment to let your mind wander. And for me, it is more than that. For me, windows are also the ultimate thresholds, the ability to exist here and there at once, to be an observer and a participant, to move between worlds. Windows are a constant sense of possibility: I am inside and the outside keeps changing. And windows are the perfect balance between control and its opposite— my room is warm/ cool/ loud/ quiet, and outside is whatever it chooses to be, and on my window seat, I inhabit both those worlds together. I think of all creative work as that too — a window looking outwards from inside my mind, or looking into my mind from far out there, and I suppose I just find the threshold thrilling.

When I rented a room to set up my own office space, for the first time after returning from Hedgebrook this July, I knew again that all I truly needed was a huge window; everything else, I could work around. So imagine my joy at finding a garage in my neighbourhood with wall-to-wall windows on two sides and wonderful landlords to boot— it was a no brainer! Over the 4 months that I have worked from here, every single visitor has exclaimed at the window, reminding me that our love of light and ventilation is universal, even if not everyone articulates it as such. I look out at the sports ground of the local community centre, so I am writing or painting on this side while on the other side, a soccer team is practising, a woman is going for a run, kids are scampering up a slide. The contrast is perfect.

Try this for me, either by a window in your own house or the next time you go out to a cafe: Find a seat by the window, spend a good chunk of your time there staring out of it, and then go into your writing, painting, thinking, creating, being from that space. Or just get into a public bus in your city, find a window seat, and spend an hour’s journey staring out, no cell phone or conversation to distract you. Settle into the liminality of the window, and tell me if it changes you or your work.