Hi, I’m Emily Lupita. This is a series featuring a letter from me offering words to nurture your creative spirit, followed by a brief writer interview sharing about their current projects, encouragement for fellow creatives, and their favorite quote.
Dear Compañeros de Camino (Traveling Companions),
My dear heart, no one tells you that coming back is its own kind of work. We speak often of the descent, the long dark night, the season when the soul goes quiet and even the paint dries untouched on the palette. But the returning? The returning is rarely spoken of.
So let me speak of it now.
You will not wake one morning restored. The light does not arrive all at once, and it is not supposed to. It comes the way dawn comes to a valley…first the edges, then the ridgeline, then, at last, the floor where you have been sitting all this time. You may not even notice it has begun. You will simply catch yourself humming. You will reach for a pen without deciding to. You will notice the color of a bright yellow lemon and feel something stir that you thought had gone for good.
That stirring is not small. That stirring is the whole thing.
Do not rush yourself here. Eyes long accustomed to darkness need time to bear the brightness, and there is no shame in shielding them. The dark night was not wasted time. It was not a detour from your creative life. It was the deep root work, done underground, where no one could judge it, and no one could interrupt it. What grows now grows from that.
So begin gently:
Make one thing that is only for you, and show it to no one.
Let it be undone. Let it be unfinished. Let it exist anyway.
Return to a medium you abandoned, not to master it, but to greet it.
Say thank you to the darkness before you leave it.
You may find that what you make now is different than what you made before. It may be quieter. It may hold more grief in it, and also more tenderness. This is not a loss. This is the deepening. The artist who has been to the bottom of the well brings back water the rest of us are thirsty for.
You did not break. You were being made larger.
And now, slowly, at your own pace, in your own hour…come back into the light and bring your work with you. We have been waiting for it.
May it be a blessing,
🦋 Emily Lupita
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After a career of teaching, writing, and designing learning programs for higher education and corporate learning, I’ve chosen a more creative path. I’m telling my story and helping others to tell theirs.
I’m working on building a virtual writing community called “Writers Inspired by the Arts.” The twice-monthly sessions feature guest speakers who share how they incorporate another art form—such as drawing, painting, photography, dance, etc.—into their writing toolkit. We’ve had multi-published and multi-talented authors visit with us, each one sharing their creativity practices and specific tips on what the audience can add to their own toolkits. I have a companion group for my paid subscribers, called Writing in Companionship. We meet virtually every two weeks to work on our own projects, together, silently on camera. People focus on weekly writing tasks, or on pieces in other art forms after catching up and sharing intentions for the session. We finish with updates. I call that process “gentle accountability.” Both projects are designed to help people build creative capacity together.
I’m going to deflect a bit and say that I’m encouraged regularly by the extended community I’ve found here in Substack. I worked remotely for a large portion of my career (starting way before COVID), so I’m used to the types of friendships you can form at a distance but with strongly connected outlooks, purpose, or backgrounds. Communicating here through story is a huge gift. The community encourages me.
“Any discipline can help your writing: logic, mathematics, theology, and of course and particularly drawing. Anything that helps you to see, anything that makes you look. The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that doesn’t require his attention.” -Flannery O’Connor
”To photograph is to confer importance. There is probably no subject that cannot be beautified; moreover, there is no way to suppress the tendency inherent in all photographs to accord value to their subjects.” -Susan Sontag
“I think it’s vital to keep discovering new delights in life. Sometimes that means going back to past loves and making them new. The passion that I’ve recently restored to my life is visual art.” -Aimee Liu
What creative projects are you working on these days? Share a favorite quote.
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