Consistency in creativity: a self-love practice

Spiders as potent symbols of creativity and alchemy

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Photo by norbert velescu on Unsplash

Hi lovelies,

Spiders are the ultimate alchemists: co-creating with their own beings and the world around them, transforming the stuff of their bodies into silk, into ethereal webwork that is both delicate and resilient. They say spider silk is strong enough to stop a bullet, even.

I wrote this week’s newsletter in Venice Beach, where I’ve been lucky enough to spend a lot of time this year. There are massive brown widow spiders all over the neighborhood, crafting webs that stretch across street signs, and in the backyard at my sister’s home, one spent weeks dangling from its perch high up in a corner of the backyard that it proudly claimed.

I’m feeling a multitude of things here, in the current season of my life, but what’s been surfacing repeatedly is the knowledge that I am the only thing that’s stopping me from getting to where I want to be.

It’s funny that I can both hold the enormity of this knowledge and still feel entirely and decidedly ✨uncomfy✨ with it. I can hold space for this, and acknowledge that I’ve been in a little funk this week, considering the immense ramifications of what this means for me now, as I continue to embark on my path forward as a self-employed human. I say little because prior to writing this, I was doing my very best to avoid the funk, and because I’ve been striving to make it feel little.

After all, I’m also happy to be in this season of my life. I feel safer in my own skin than I have ever been. I’ve been unfolding, expanding, experiencing, and sitting in the discomfort of uncertainty—and reaping its unexpected blessings—all year long.

And throughout the process, I have been throwing my creative all at Instagram and on Substack. I have been reminding myself, repeatedly, that slow growth is still growth (in more ways than one). Yet it’s just as sticky, just as much work, to get out of my own way as it is to show up even when the numbers, the engagement, aren’t quite where I want them to be yet.

Maybe it’s that the two—getting out of my own way and showing up—are irrevocably linked. Maybe it’s that in this place, they are the exact same thing.

So, while I hang out here, in this one of many liminal spaces I’ve dangled within, I’ve been striving to find more consistency in my practices. To stay grounded in them, whether creative, physical, mindful, spiritual— I’ve been looking for ways to reframe this consistency. Searching for how to make, if not magical the mundane, then at least the returning to each practice feel less quotidian (though they somehow remain daunting) on my off days.

But how do you keep putting out your best stuff while doing that? How do you source the magic regularly and not just “by rote”? How do you avoid coming up against the confines of your habits, thought patterns, the everyday grooves you’re accustomed to touching on in your work? And how do we make this kind of dogged persistence feel, well, a little less dogged, and a little more sexy?

What’s been working for me:

Seeing rest not as an indulgence or luxury, but as a necessity to doing my best work. And by rest I don’t mean rotting in bed on Sunday while alternating between Netflix and Instagram, I mean guilt-free, restorative, phone- and screen-less rest. The kind of stillness that actually slows your frantically racing brain do-o-o-own.

This is both very hard to do and nothing short of illuminating when you finally do achieve it, especially when it comes to getting unstuck on the page or feeling that wonderful zzzt! feeling that comes with the grace of a new idea popping into your head.

Recognizing, keeping track of, and honoring the times of day when I’m feeling most creative. Realize that this may and likely will change during different seasons of your life. Honor, hold space and special attention, for each of them, but especially the one you’re in now, right now, the now that is all we have. Care for it thoughtfully and tenderly.

With enough repetition, you train yourself to see it as something different. When you engage in something again and again: you’re bound to repeat yourself in output a few times— and then eventually realize that it’s not the end of the world.

What happens as you go:

• You come up against the confines of what you perceive as your abilities, and keep at it anyway. Watch as they expand, sometimes in leaps and bounds, sometimes painfully, incrementally.

• Watch as your creative muscles grow, too. Marvel as they flex, change, and strengthen.

• Continue to play this game, and if it’s with slightly less blind enthusiasm on some days, then so be it. It makes the moments of gorgeous inspiration more special, anyway: that you can find your way to them, along the habitual grooves you’ve created, that amidst the many intersections of recurrent lines and dots and squiggles, you can find a new pattern.

• Lather, rinse, repeat.

The etymology of the word “creativity” is derived from the Latin “creare”, or to make, and Greek “Krelnein”, or fulfill.

I can’t think of anything more personally fulfilling than the act of creating something. Than the pulling of something from ourselves—body, mind, and soul—and of changing these Selves in and throughout the process, whether rapidly or incrementally, until that creation is fully realized in the world.

In this way, consistency in creativity can be seen as deciding to reach for that fulfillment again and again. It can be seen as a love language, as, indeed, the ultimate act of love for ourselves and others, for the world(s) we exist in, for the realms we want to create—not unlike the spider devotedly weaving its web.

Creativity as transformation. As glorious manifestation. And consistency as self-love practice, then.

Another way I’ve seen consistency reframed lately is as devotion over dedication. Though both are needed to see our most beautifully impossible-seeming dreams and goals through, I love that tweak, because it draws us back to the concept that so many of our practices as writers, artists, and human beings are spiritual ones— taken a step further, acts of devotion.

Creativity is inherently spiritual, just like we as human beings are inherently spiritual. When we create, we become channels for something else to pass through us. We give ourselves up—whether briefly or for long stretches at a time—for something more.

When I show up regularly to the page, to the mat, to my Substack, I’m diving right back into the flow of my spiritual practice. I’m opening myself up to the channel of creativity. I’m allowing in any downloads that wish to come.

And it is sacred, whether I’m coming back to it regularly or not— but don’t I want more of that in my everyday? Absolutely I do. So I come back to the page and the ‘Stack, the mat and my morning Reiki meditations. Even when my brain is frantically trying to do anything but slow down.

I show up and sit my butt in the chair.

Spiders are such a potent symbol of this unerring persistence, this spiritual creativity, in the natural world—their webs both birthed from them and their canvas, their home and their means of capturing food. The silken alchemy they produce is so much more than a pretty geometric design (though it is an example of a sacred one), or a kind of pursuit. It is a means of survival.

When I think of what my soul needs to survive, it is this thing I show up for. This is my path forward, what I’m here to do regardless of the changing platforms I’m sharing across, regardless of the shifting algorithms.

By any and all means possible, I’m going to continue weaving my web.

If you enjoyed reading this week’s newsletter, I hope you’ll consider forwarding it along to a friend. If you’re reading this on Substack, I’d love if you shared or restacked it. This helps new readers find my work!

xx,

Kimia