Practice Makes A Life

Hello Everyone,

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the concept of practice.

As the Wise Women and I have been exploring the consciousness of the Creatrix and what it means to feed our artists, I’ve been researching artists and the ways they keep their creativity flowing.

One thing I’ve noticed is how often they refer to their art as a practice. It’s always a writing practice, a painting practice, a musical practice or even a movement practice. Artists of every kind speak of creativity not as something they possess, but as something they return to. Something they tend. Something they devote themselves to, whether inspiration arrives that day or not.

I live on a street full of diversity; across the road from me live a beautiful Sri Lankan family, always smiling and bringing us fruits from their garden. Next to them are Mr & Mrs Pappas, with the huge greenhouses in their backyard and the large extended family that comes and goes, sitting under the front verandah with them whenever the sun shines. And then next to them live the 2 young men with their drum kits. Those boys practise their drums every afternoon, without fail. I love listening to them try new drills, sometimes faltering, and then starting again, but eventually, through repetition, nailing it. They’re so consistent that if I’m out in the garden in the late afternoon and I don’t hear them, I quietly admonish them to the plants. They’re not practising today, I say to the cabbage; I hope they squeeze some time in later.

And at the top end of the street lives a couple with one of those anxious dogs that rushes the fence whenever you walk past, poor thing. One of them is a member of an a cappella singing group. During the summer they fling open their windows when they practise and let the beautiful harmonies waft down the street. There’s truly nothing better than watering tomatoes to pitch-perfect voices harmonising together.

These artists came to mind while I’ve been researching. None of them woke up one morning knowing how to hold a rhythm or create those exquisite harmonies together.

They practised.

They listened, repeated, adjusted and began again. They trained their ears, their voices and their hands. They stayed with the awkwardness of not yet being able to do the thing. Slowly, through practice, through returning to their craft, through repetition, they created the skill that allowed the music to move freely through them.

I think this is what we sometimes misunderstand about creativity. We believe that artists are born with a special ability that sets them apart. I would counter that, and say that we are all born with the ability to create; we arrive in this world as creative beings. However, it’s what we do with that innate ability that matters.

Of course, not all of us are born with beautiful voices, and some of us will never be able to dance like Baryshnikov (although Baryshnikov wasn’t born Baryshnikov either, was he?) But creativity is so much more than what we narrowly perceive it to be.

Creativity is our ability to work with what is available and bring into being something that did not exist before. Sometimes that becomes a painting, a poem or a piece of music. But it can also become a nourishing meal made from whatever remains in the cupboard, a garden shaped from an unpromising patch of earth, a room made beautiful with objects collected over a lifetime, or a ritual created to carry us through a difficult season.

We are creating when we find a new way to solve an old problem. When we bring people together around a table. When we tend a friendship, shape a business, raise a family or imagine a life beyond the one we have been told we must accept. We create through the stories we tell, the questions we ask, the clothes we wear, the plants we grow and the ways we choose to care for one another.

And we are all engaged in the ongoing creative practice of composing a life.

I’ve become quite enamoured with the word practice. It’s a humble word. It doesn’t require us to be brilliant; it simply invites us to return. Over and over again. To immerse ourselves in the act of creating and sink deeply into the pleasure of it. To be our own Sophias, delighting in the process of creation.

To practise is to acknowledge that we have not finished learning. That mastery is not a place at which we arrive, but a relationship we continue to deepen.

Practice is not a word the overculture likes. The overculture likes performance and perceived perfection. It likes things that keep us a captive audience, separate from ourselves as we put others on a pedestal.

Practice holds little value for the overculture because every hour spent writing imperfectly, or singing badly, or experimenting in the garden, or trying a new recipe, or practising deep listening with a friend keeps us away from their manipulation of our minds and souls. Every hour spent in practice is an hour away from the screen, away from doomscrolling, away from the relentless noise of the overculture. It is an hour in which we stop living as an audience and begin inhabiting our own lives again. Practice returns us to the private relationship between ourselves and the thing we are learning to love.

Practice gathers our attention back from all the places competing for it and places it into our own hands.

I feel that makes practice a sacred word, because while doing something over and over sounds a little boring, we can remember that repetition infused with intention becomes ritual. Returning to the page, the instrument, the garden or the weaving is a way of saying: This matters to me. I am willing to give part of my finite life to it. And showing up to practise something again and again returns us to ourselves.

Every hour spent in practice is an hour given in devotion to creation, and therefore to life itself.

With Much Love,