Gathered and Given Back

Good morning, friends, makers, writers. For those who don’t know, we’re in Chapter Seven of our 100 Days of Making & Writing practice, Making from Relationship. It’s a good time to jump in, or jump back in! Today, we’re making and writing something from a the formative one. There’s a short intro essay, and a detailed invitation at the end of the post.

She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.

This stunning quote comes from Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and it captures perfectly the power of our most formative relationships—the ones that gather the pieces of us and return us to ourselves.

Sometimes, maybe most often, the most formative relationships do this gathering and returning work so early and deeply that we barely see it until much, much later, because the influence simply becomes part of who we feel we’ve always been.

This is probably what makes most formative relationships so powerful—sometimes we internalize the formative person so completely that their voice becomes part of our own internal monologue. Their responses to us and perceptions of us become part of our own operating system. The formative relationship doesn’t exactly shape us the way sculptors shape clay—from the outside, actively, with tools meant for the job. It shapes us more like water shapes stone—gradually over time, and invisibly, until the shape is simply who we are.

So today we try to make something from that shaping—we try to give a solid shape to an influence that we’ve absorbed so thoroughly we sometimes forget it’s an influence at all. Today we ask: who gathered our pieces and returned them to us in the right order?

Here’s a short video and a few words about the riches you’ll find here (and it’s a place to introduce yourselves, as well). With this Curriculum Index, you can check out all the things we have going on in our incredible archive of essays and writing exercises for any mood.

Right now, we’re smack in the middle of our 100 Days of Making & Writing Practice, Day 66, The Formative One! Remember, it doesn’t matter if you start on Day 1, Day 12, Day 20, or right now with Day 66. I call each ten-day section a chapter, and we are in the middle of chapter seven—Making from Relationship—but you can also explore the entire experience here in any order that suits your desire.

There is no right or wrong way to do this—every day is another chance to choose our own adventure. We’re just so, so glad you’re here!

Welcome, welcome!

Mark your calendars for our upcoming 100 Days of Making & Writing Community Zooms for us to come together, share snippets of the work, ask questions, and celebrate the creative synergy. I’ll send out Zoom links closer to the events—and you can always check the WITD calendar of events here, too, but, meanwhile, here are dates to mark:

Today we’re looking deeply at the way we’ve been formed by specific relationships—and in particular, we’re trying to focus on a single person whose influence runs so deep that we can barely imagine having become who we are without this person in our life.

For many of us, this person might be a parent or grandparent, an aunt or an uncle. It could definitely be a sibling or a teacher or a childhood friend—or a teacher, mentor, or first love. Whoever it is, this is a person whose voice we still hear sometimes when we’re making big decisions. Maybe we can feel their