How I came back to creative life
In 2022, I splurged some of my Nike severance money on a minor pilgrimage to the desert to process my despair, loss, and feelings of stuckness. I needed wide-open clear-skied vistas and delighted in the idea of seeing palm trees against a neverending celestial blue. It was the exact metaphor I was chasing. A bodyworker at my Palm Desert hotel asked me where I lived, and when I said New York City, she said she could tell. My energy was depleted. I needed to plant my feet onto the earth, she explained. Go find a rock and sit on it. It would tell me a truth.
I drove out to Joshua Tree for the first time and spent the afternoon wrapping my body across boulders to root into sacred earth. Autumn in the desert is warm but not overly hot, so the heat from the stones was soothing. Scaling a rock formation to select a perfect nook to sink into is an act of gravity, strength, and release, all at the same time. You use the information that your body is feeding you—too sharp, too high, too public, too far, too slippery, too steep—until you arrive at a crevice that fits your seat. That cradling is a negotiation of all of your senses. These rock formations were sculpted by the torments of centuries of wind and rain. It was a great reminder of the resilience honored in the natural world.
Leaning against a boulder in a yogic crescent-moon posture, I could see the desert wilderness swirl around me. The metaphoric rock was holding various parts of my body. In the breathing and the great expanse, I remembered how small my own life is. All natural beings are weathered and formed by time. My transformation was as natural as the howling, exposed atmosphere. On what felt like a cellular level, a calm overtook me, and I was able to read myself again as a being in need of elementary sensation—laughter and light; the warmth of the sun on my face, feeling helped by a great blue sky overhead. Though it seemed like a burden at the time, I forced myself to document the expanse in photos: to be playful and let the camera dance in the angles of the sun.
There is enough cell coverage for me to find and screenshot this poem by Danielle Boyd titled “the earth that holds you”:
and when we get quiet enough
we hear its stories
The answers have always been
buried deep within
The shadow of our ground
Later, I found myself at the Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Sculpture. For nearly two decades, the artist created over 100 sculptures and installations using found and discarded materials like bicycle parts, appliances, and bedsprings. Purifoy’s art explores themes of social justice and challenges traditional notions by embracing the unconventional and honoring the mundane. I was moved by the asymmetrical balance of Purifoy’s sculptures, how the changing elements of varying visual weights could nevertheless create equilibrium. The tour of the property was unlocking something in me, that innate desire to use my own perspective to create again.
My notes from the desert were humble: You can do surprising things, hold space for yourself, a ripple in a pool of water reminds you that kinetic healing energy exists all around.
Back in Brooklyn, I needed to learn how to contain the vastness of the desert within me. That is to say, how to excavate openness in the ancient quarry of my living body. I realized social media had extracted something from my psyche; within days, I’d returned to doomscrolling and comparison, imagining myself with a new job and new title and posing with the success-erati. I fell back into binge-streaming and that cardboard dissatisfaction of a meal with no nutrients.
So, I committed to an aesthetic’s analog life. In my mind, I was reacquainting myself with a younger version of me. One who in college, drew from a macrame of inspiration to live a writerly life. I returned to books of poetry, talk radio, mix tapes, and meandering urban walks. I ceased reading the news and turned to morning radio. I stopped watching shows and borrowed books from Brooklyn’s wonderful public library. I stopped scrolling interior designers on Instagram and read hardcovers for at least one hour every night. With that space, my writing routine returned—reading at night and practicing The Artist Way’s morning pages upon rising. What came forth were essays of contemplation.
New York is a city alive, fast and frantic, with expectations you keep pace. So I also had to edit my calendar to snip commitments that worked against my slow contemplation. I gave up being social for a bit, stopped drinking with friends, made dinner at home, and kept Sundays to myself to write, read, and grocery shop, and prepare for my week in solitude.
I listened to public radio to fill my mind with new voices and found great pleasure in Terry Gross’s interviews on NPR, from author Danzy Senna’s complicated relationship with colorism to cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s rebel years. Gross uncovers the complex and tender moments that define her subjects, and I needed to hear their voices quiver and soften. In other author interviews, I discovered how personal singular experiences could give birth to books, like Rachel Kushner’s eco-espionage novel, Creation Lake, formed by her summers in France. Then, on WNYC, there was an interview with Indigenous artist Rose B. Simpson, who studied car design at the Rhode Island School of Design before applying that industrial mindset to sculpture that drew from the lowrider car culture of her native New Mexico. These voices reminded me of the power of circumstance.
I started to build a world for myself that centered on slow, rambling, imperfect creativity. I grew excited to get to bed early and sink into a novel. I became that person interleaving books. I found myself a member of two book clubs: one for staying accountable in getting through The Artist’s Way and the other for challenging me to read books outside of my interests and comfort zone. I reclaimed my own interior life, my inner world of thoughts, feelings, values, and self-awareness, distinct from external actions or social roles. I was becoming who I had always been: untitled, opinionated, thoughtful, and once again, curious.
Join me in this series where I share my rediscovery of “aliveness”—getting back to the analog, reading, and salons to reinvigorate my sense of purpose and creativity.
