Creative Solitude, part II

a story of a time I gave myself a creative solitude

Creative Solitude, part II

Last winter, just as we were stepping into the portal of a new year, I gave myself another opportunity for an extended creative solitude.

This time would be much different from my first experience of creative solitude. That first time, I felt a sense of being forced, of being “exiled” into a distance and a solitude that were not entirely of my own choosing, and during which I was expected to perform, produce, and create according to an external timeline / guideline / deadline. It was a time in my life when I was also moving through a lot of feelings of struggle and lack and molding myself to conform to an expected tradition. It wasn’t a “bad” time in my life–I’ve moved away from simplistic labelings of “good” and “bad” for things as complex as whole chapters in our lives–and it was my right step at the time, and it taught me a lot, and brought me a lot of gifts that I’m still enjoying now, and it stood me in good stead. 

I’m inviting the different parts and stages and chapters of me into a deeper integration.

But my second experience of creative solitude was much different.

It was just after New Year’s, 2023. The world was emerging, waking up after a long sleep. When I flew across the world on 2 January, I had not traveled internationally in many years. I had to relearn a lot of things that I had forgotten. And I took a new me with myself. I was in the last stages of working on an academic book–a 4-year project that ultimately would not work out, that was beset by snarls of challenge at every turn, and that is still in a state of unsatisfying limbo today. I was deeply immersed in flow in my various creative communities, which I was able to pack up and take with me in a way that we just didn’t do back in 2017–while away, I attended an important work committee meeting, a tarot workshop that happened at 3 in the morning in my time zone, and a writers’ gathering, all via Zoom. I was alone, but able to stay in the circles and communities I’d built.

I took myself to Athens, Greece. The reasons I was there were pleasantly nebulous. I needed quiet time and immersion into the ancient context to work on my academic book. I was planning to lead a group of students on an archaeology trip in the spring (another plan that did not end up working out the way that I had envisioned) and wanted to refamiliarize myself with the sites and museums and local communities of Athens. I was also following a desire that felt simple in its clarity but is difficult to explain, because it emerged from intuition and the inner pull and a call that doesn’t have a name, to seek creative solitude again. I wanted to do it across an ocean, in Athens. And I was now in a place in my life where I could fly across the world and stay in an apartment with a balcony by myself for a week. And I’d just learned enough about “fuck it,” and about “refilling the well,” and about “giving from a full cup,” and about “self-care ain’t selfish” in order to do it.

***

Do you have one of those cities that just speaks to your soul? Athens is one of those places for me. I’ve been there enough times now that returning feels like a little coming-home. I re-immerse myself, remind myself of the familiar long walks and steep hills and ancient masonry behind gates and restaurants and coffee shops and the sidewalk kiosks that sell ice cream and keychains and the smell of the streets. Athens! I love Athens. It was the first place I ever traveled to outside of the US when I was my students’ age. It’s a city that’s important to me creatively, and professionally, and spiritually, and in my development as a human being. I love and hold dear a lot of other cities too–there’s New York! and Palm Springs! and LA! and Prague! and Chania on the island of Crete!–but there is nowhere else for me quite like Athens, Greece.

I took myself on the most marvelous extended artist’s date to all my favorite museums and sites in the city. The Parthenon! The agora! The Roman forum! The Tower of the Winds! The Cycladic Museum! Hello, “goddess” statues of the prehistoric Cycladic peoples. The Byzantine Museum! The Numismatics Museum! which is housed in the converted mansion of Heinrich Schliemann, one of the classic colonialist archaeologists of the nineteenth century on their white-savior quests to pillage the ancient histories of other parts of the world. (My generation Z students love learning about the dark colonialist history of archaeology and the museum as an institution, and advocate for the return of ancient objects to their traditional homelands. It’s one of the livelier discussions in my classes. :) 

Ostensibly I was on this whirlwind tour of Athenian antiquities to prepare myself to take students there–but actually I was taking myself. I was taking my younger self, the student who’d experienced all those things for the first time 15 years earlier. I was taking my current self, writer and teacher and seer of the world, who hadn’t seen anything in 3 years of fear and isolation and pandemic. I was also taking my future self–I don’t quite know when I will be back to Athens. It will be someday, but I have no plans for the when. (Early last year I was in the midst of a “fertility journey” whose end I didn’t yet know, but there was always the sense in my body that things could change at any minute. And they did.)

I remembered the language, and the way that language exists in hidden pockets of our mind and memory and tongue and eyes and even our body. You can forget a language you don’t use for a long time, but you can also remember. Walking the streets felt like exercise for my eyes and mind, as I reabsorbed and relearned to recognize the Greek alphabet, the written language resettling into its old niche inside me. I know some modern Greek, but am “fluent” in ancient Greek. (I don’t believe ancient languages are “dead,” and I love chatting about what it means to be “fluent” in an ancient language. If you do too, hit me up.) The alphabets are the same, the one adapted from the Phoencians in the 8th century BCE. Modern Greek has a different pronunciation, so I’m slow in speaking and understanding, but I can read. The written landscape is familiar to me. I remember that we live in a world of writing, of words.

I stayed in a fourth-floor apartment with a balcony. I remembered! Everyone in Athens hangs their washing on the line. I had to push a button and wait 20 minutes for a little hot water. The TV had 2 or 3 channels that showed Greek game shows. It was January but sunny and warm. No one in Athens walks around with their earphones in their ears (like we do in the US). The African refugees sell bracelets on the beaches and the edges of the tourist markets. Syntagma Square was occupied by a protest movement, a tent city, the first time I was in Athens, not long after the country’s major financial crisis of 2008. In winter 2023, there was a massive Christmas tree in the center of the square, the tent city long gone. One evening there was something wrong with the electricity in my apartment, so my Airbnb host, Giorgios, came up to help, and we sat at the kitchen table and chatted. He asked me what I was working on; to make a long story short I said, “The Antikythera mechanism.” Unsure of what I meant, he looked it up on his phone and said, “Ah! The Antikythera disc!” The guy at the nearby cafe learned my order (an iced chai and a cheese pie). It seems it is now safe to throw toilet paper into the toilets in Athens, something you could NOT do the last time I was there; signs in bathrooms all over the country used to remind travelers of this unfamiliar directive. I learned how many Euro cents it cost to buy bananas at the local market, and how to tell the lady that I didn’t need a bag, I had my own. The tourist market of Monastiraki sprawled between me and the museums, so every morning and evening I passed through the famous flea market where you can buy evil eye jewelry and T-shirts that they make for you on the spot and every kind of olive oil product known to humankind.

I’d never been to Greece in January before. Athens is full of orange trees that bloom in winter. They are so abundant that soft small citrus fruits fall to the sidewalks and streets and line the gutters. The equally abundant motorbikes zooming through smash the oranges under their wheels and leave broken skins and crushed flesh and seeds throughout the streets. The bitter oranges decompose in wet gutters, bright as jewels.

***

The first book I published in 2022, The Book of Flower Garlands, was set in Athens. When I traveled there in 2023, I had not been there since publishing my book and sharing my characters’ story with the world. They fell in love in the tenderest and most sun-drenched and open way, in Athens and some of my other favorite cities around Greece. I walked again where my characters walked and imagined them there. I climbed the hill in their neighborhood–Lycabettus–and saw the acropolis across the way, like they did. I visited some of their favorite places, the places that made them. I reread their story and rested in their energy again. There was no “point” to any of this, not even the kind of osmotic research writers use to write about a place, an absorption of the vibe of the place, an active but gentle noticing. I had already written, edited, shared, published, promoted, sold the book. This was a purposeless pleasure, an indulgence. It was a celebration. I wanted to be in Athens with my characters, for no one and for nothing, just me and them, alone. So I did.

***

If I did any creative “work” while in Athens last winter, it was the work of editing. It was the work of revising, of re-seeing my stories. I have a lot of stories. I have quite literally thousands of pages of characters playing in their worlds on the page. What do I do with so much rich raw material? As I continue my publishing journey, both self-publishing and traditional publishing, my work in that area has refined itself into a process of choosing, of discernment, of polishing and readying my stories to be seen. What will I share next? Which of the stories feels both ripe and relevant for publication now? Which stories are just for me, or for my closest circle? Which stories do I need to let go of, to let them be mulch for my future work? How will I order and organize and synthesize the stories? I don’t find this process tedious, or cerebral, or corporate. It doesn’t feel like making a spreadsheet or downsizing a company or packing products into cardboard boxes. This kind of work feels infused with a bright-eyed, glowing pleasure of choosing. It’s like picking a delicious ice cream flavor or trying on beautiful dresses or–best of all–flower arranging, a creative and meditative practice that’s all about aesthetic values like color magic, floriography, and awareness of pattern and shape. How will I arrange the bouquet of my stories–each one so colorful, so lovely, so vibrant, so diverse–to delight someone else?

I did find this process beautiful, but that’s not to say that it was easy, or without grief. I found myself grieving deeply for the changes in my stories, the ones I had to let go of, the beats in my characters’ journeys that “wouldn’t happen,” the scenes or narrative twists that wouldn’t see the light of day beyond my own eyes. And I found myself asking some deep questions about the nature of narrative. 

What HAPPENS to characters that we let go of? What happens to a scene that gets “edited out” of a story–does it just cease to exist? What happens when you change something about a character, or something that happens to a character? Where does all of this–meaning and energy and learning and insight and development and existence–go?

As a mystical and esoteric writer, I believe that the characters we create ARE real; they simply exist on a different ontological plane. So my asking of these questions was not trivial. These questions would mean something for me, and my characters, and my writing, and the time we all share together, from then on.

I didn’t find any “answers.” Creative and mystical and esoteric questions rarely have answers, though. Living the creative life is about sitting with and in the questions that don’t have answers, and with and in the many times that intentions don’t turn out the way we planned. So I had to content myself with a few realizations and insights that, a year later, I’m still playing with, and will be writing my way into for more time to come:

A secret of story is that time is malleable.

Time is moldable.

Time is nonlinear.

Multiple timelines can exist simultaneously. Story works in and on this magical plane of flexible temporality.

When you “delete” a scene, it doesn’t go anywhere.

There exists a story universe in which that scene still happens. The love between your characters happened. The love you felt, the tears you cried while creating that scene, they also happened.

Story is a snake whose body is composed of numerous sections. You can move, remove, reorder, delete, add, take away, share, reveal, conceal, restore, save for later, any part of the story that you wish. Story is energy. And, as we know, energy cannot be destroyed—it can only change form.

And because story is mysticism, this also means that our life can be edited, altered, shifted, written, rewritten, changed. Human time also is malleable, moldable, magical, flexible, nonlinear, and can exist simultaneously on numerous timelines.

***

There was one twilight afternoon, as the sun sets early in the depth of winter, when I sat at a cafe with a warm drink, writing in my journal and crying because I would never be able to meet my characters in real life. This is the kind of thing that maybe seems funny in the retelling but was NOT FUNNY at the time; it felt devastatingly real and serious. I worried that I “wasn’t cool enough” or my life wasn’t cool enough; yes, there was a reawakening of some hurt adolescent feelings inside me, of the girl I was when I first began to realize that a) writing was actually really important to me, in ways that I could not explain and b) it wasn’t going to make any sense to most of the people in my life. I wrote myself through my hurt feelings in my journal. I remember writing that I helped create my characters and I am their steward and their mouthpiece in the world of gross material existence and therefore I am cool and my life is really cool. I remembered a friend I had when I was a little girl, who used to comfort me when I was sad by saying, “Don’t worry, you’re cooler than a Conehead.” (What can I say, it was the early 90s and for some reason we were obsessed with the movie Coneheads.)

***

When I flew back to the US, on my first layover flight from Athens to Heathrow I sat next to a man from Cyprus. We chatted the whole time. It was marvelous to talk to a stranger again. I told him I was a writer, historian, and archaeologist; he whipped out a digital map of Greece on his iPad and we talked about all our favorite places in the country. We talked about the long, long sweep of history, about how history is taught and understood. He said, “Does it get sad sometimes, just teaching about one group of people killing and taking over and ravaging the land of another group of people, over and over again throughout all of human history?” And I said, I mean, yeah, sure… but there’s so much more to the human story than that. We have to challenge ourselves to zoom in, to see the stories, even the tiny ones, about when we love each other or support each other or change something for the better or create something wonderful. There’s no reason that history can’t also be about that. My new friend and I hugged as we disembarked from the plane. I don’t know that guy’s name, and probably we’ll never see each other again. But what a lovely plane ride and reentry back into my “regular life.” 

***

-What have been your periods of creative solitude? What did you learn there?

-How do you feel about “editing” your stories? I know a lot of writers who have complicated feelings around that topic. And don’t fall into the false story of the isolated and lonely writer, doing it all by themself in the ivory tower. Editing can be brave and scary work, even shadow work. Get yourself an editor with a growth mindset who believes in you and your stories.

-What cities do you love? How have the places you’ve been help shape who you are?

-Where are you on your story journey now?

Thanks for reading, and so much love,

M

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Hey. I’m Mistress M. I’m a writer, writing guide, teacher, dancer, and creative activist based in Newark, New Jersey. 

I am a person whose ancestors were enslaved people who helped build the structures of this country where I live. I stand with the lightworkers + those seeking the liberation of all peoples from oppression. I live + create most humbly on Mohican + Lenape territory, and I lovingly acknowledge the ancestors + elders, past and present, of the land on which we live.

• Do YOU know the ancestral elders of the land on which you live? Check out this tool, Native Land, to learn more. Educate thyself. ♥️

My creative works, outlook, and spiritual practice are all delightfully queer. If you, too, support the beautiful rainbow of all human experience, then I’ve got a table here with plenty of open seats, and you can totally sit with me. 🏳️‍🌈

I am a creative dominatrix who believes that everyone is creative and that everyone can find the creative rhythm that works for them, and that supports them in reaching their creative dreams. 

I am the founder and editor-in-chief of Mistress M’s Community Publishing House, a full-service, boutique book incubator where we hold the values that no matter what our hearts desire to create, there is an audience seeking it; that, by putting our work out into the world, our audience will find us; and that there IS space in the marketplace for the offerings of our hearts.

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