the art of returning

creativity's many loops

Two Mondays ago, I let myself take the day off from writing for the government holiday. Last Monday, the fiber optic cable connecting our whole mountain region was cut during some construction and internet and cell service were down for a day and a half. Today, I return to my writing, and your inbox.

Having reasons to take the last two weeks off writing this letter felt right in time for me—there’s a reason I didn’t go ahead and publish those Tuesdays. After being away from home for a month and out of routine, I was taking time to recover from the journey. I was having plenty of ideas, so much I wanted to write! But besides collecting these ideas and some notes, I hadn’t returned fully to my practice—my journal, my personal creative work, and this labor of love. In the last two weeks I was doing lots of writing for my coaching work as usual, and putting together materials for a class, and finishing up a book project that’s taken a hard-working year and a half, and keeping up with the Friday prompts. Was I ready to go back to my own practice, and this intensive work?

No, wait—wait.

Going back is not the same as returning. We are bound away from the source and back around.

Creativity is a series of many loops.

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There are so many ways we return in writing.

We return to the blank page, to the journal, to yesterday’s words. Again and again we come back to where we are. We return to the craft. We return to the same ideas, memories, themes, the same questions, sometimes the same conclusions. We return to projects we’ve started and stopped for reasons we don’t even know. For years and lifetimes we return to the same stories, which imprison us when we can’t see how to change them, which liberate us when we can’t help but.

Many of the people I work with are returning to writing after decades suppressing their childhood or teenage or young adult dreams—many of you are doing this. This is a beautiful returning, and I’m glad whenever I hear them phrase it that way—returning to what I always loved, what I wanted, who I was, and who I would be happy now to be.

One writer is returning to writing publicly after years writing in secret; having achieved some success, she startled and retreated to her private work, and is now ready to return to being read. One of my writers is also a musician, and has been recently returning to music after years away focusing on business; we’re using part of our time to work on his lyrics—as he says, in order to sing the things he sings have to make him feel. Another of my writers is a former DJ who put aside that joy for business, too—as his creative expression has opened up through writing, there’s room to loop around to music again.

It doesn’t always work that way, nor should it. Putting one form of creative work aside for a time, even for years, when you feel more called through another form, can be a wonderful expansive loop—especially when you can have faith that you will return to the writing, or the music, or the painting again, allowing you to let go and give to what is calling you now, and to learn what you’ll later bring back to your original form.

Other times, you don’t return to the old form—you return to the well, to beginner’s mind, to the exciting origin points of all that is. My friend moved to New York City to pursue photography professionally ten years ago. Man, and he did it. He built up his portfolio, got gigs for big papers and campaigns, and he made a successful living out of his art. And after a while of making it, it wasn’t art anymore. In the last couple of years he’s returned to his old love, music, returning also to the feeling of starting out again, excited to learn and play as much as possible, find a footing in a new field, maybe do it all all over again.

My incredible and extremely cool mother, a professional artist and painter, put her brushes aside and started writing hilarious stories several years ago; she doesn’t feel pressure or sadness around not painting anymore—there’s too much to be excited about, coming around this long loop to begin again. My father, a career writer, has returned to beginner’s mind through sculpture, where he’s finding experimentation and fun that he admitted writing hadn’t been providing much of anymore. And he’s amazing at it. Check out what he made for me for my birthday this year, with old wood, sea glass and live oak.

JHR, “Homesick”

These kinds of returns, whether to the craft or the old form, or returning to the start of the long creative loop, back to beginner’s mind and the beginning, are journeys we are right to be on, and must be on because they are so, and we can find great happiness in this seasonality when we let go of resistance.

But what about returning that’s more like rumination, or more like trying and failing to escape? Are there kinds of returning that should be avoided? Are there creativity-deadening loops? What about these stories, themes, and ideas we return to again and again? How do I know if I’m returning to things that are helpful, useful, able to be grown and help me grow?

If you’re returning after some time away—whether it’s the next day’s writing session, or years have passed since the project you began was abandoned—is it a seasonal, circular return or is it a closed loop, something stuck? Or are you returning at the wrong time, ‘forcing it’ before the loop wants to come back around?

What about returning to patterns of avoidance—partying, over-working, self-doubt, self-hate? Returning to questions hoping for answers we’ll never get, doing the same things hoping for a new effect, returning to the same closed loop echo chamber, your fixed set of sources for information and ideas. These are constricted, constrained prison loops. Try to identify these.

You have felt the expansive effects of a night away from a draft you’re working on—the plan to return the next day sent you on a loop big enough to rest and grab some perspective before coming back around. If your pattern of returning is expansive to your current world-view or self-understanding, no matter how big or small, long or quick, this is a wonderful loop. Ideas, themes, and stories that are constrictive to your world-view or self-understanding may be pulling you back in by their own gravity—they resist the new, so you don’t want to return to these. These can become black holes of no-return. Nothing new will happen.

Repeatedly relevant.

This kind of returning is like Main Street in Pleasantville. The end is the beginning, the loop is as small as it could possibly be. When new things start to happen (sex and reading), color returns to the black and white town—something new it seems, and yet always the way it really was. Main Street opens up to the big loop of the world.

Does the loop you’re on, returning and returning, feel like an anchor keeping you up or pulling you down? Is it a loop you’re trying to escape? Is the loop so tight you can’t bring anything new into it? Is the end of the street the beginning again? Or, can you loop out to the wide world before you come back around home? Does this loop allow you to draw back to see the journey?

Tobey, what a career you’ve had!

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When I returned to the West after my time back East, I saw a weather event I’d never seen before, in this or any home. I was taking one of my favorite drives south over the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge and into the desert straight to Ghost Ranch. I had my doggies in the back, playing the local radio station (shout-out KNCE 93.5, streaming live on truetaosradio.com! 🤘), and when Roberta Flack started singing “strumming my pain with his fingers…” I looked out toward the gorge and saw this:

credit: me and Goddess

I followed this phenomenon (or she followed me) for a few miles, tears and laughter and pointing for passing cars not to miss it. When I showed the video of what I saw to my friend who grew up on the Pueblo here, she’d never seen it before either, but thought it might be a kachina spirit, which live in the natural features of the land, returning to send a message or a blessing to the people. I’m grateful to have been there to welcome this return, which felt overwhelmingly good and benevolent. My friend reminded me that there are other loops going on around us, seen and unseen, that are not our journeys but that intersect with ours.

I am a leaver. I’ve lived in many places and traveled to a lot of places around and returning to these places is not always a comfortable thing for me. It’s something I avoid. I’ve written songs I never play again, I’ve avoided returning to writing projects even when I loved what I was doing. I think this fear of returning has often been about a fear of staleness, sameness, mining the old life when the veins have long been dry. Writing as a spiritual practice has helped me greatly with rooting, resting, and seeing, but there’s still a part of me that’s always heading out.

This completely new thing in my life, something I didn’t even know existed or was possible, helped root me in my return to the mountains. It opened up something new in me and my relationship with this special place—so much possibility, so much familiar that can be transformed. The new thing helped me feel the rightness in being exactly where I had come back to.

Returning without newness is a mistake. Make your loop bigger until you’ve found it. A new image, angle, idea, feeling you’ve experienced, question, research you’ve done intentionally or just by living—collect what is new on every loop, so your return can be expansive. If you’ve brought something new back with you for this trip around, you will feel the rightness of your return. If you have contracted or constricted in the time on your loop, if something inside you has gotten smaller, it might not be time to return—maybe your loop needs to get bigger. Maybe something new needs to be caught in your loop. Maybe you need to return to the big loop and journey back to the beginning to see it all again.

Recognize what it feels like to return. Does it feel like finding, or receiving? Or does it feel only like continuing to give? There are times in writing and in reading, when we encounter something we’ve never read or thought before, that somehow also feels incredibly familiar, because we recognize it as immediately, completely true. Maybe something we’ve written that we didn’t plan comes out and to our surprise is exactly what we think. We return to the old pages, grown wiser in our time away, and think, there you are. Happy to see you. Thanks for waiting. When I saw the spirit cloud, I felt that feeling—like something I knew but had forgotten, finally coming back. Like falling in love, like getting back into color from black and white, like getting something back.

I know it’s right to return when I feel as if something is being returned to me.