Tracy is making big, bold paintings.

Beth is organizing a book-in-progress.

Kathy is mastering a foreign language.

Suz just won a poetry contest.

My friends are thinking, feeling, making, creating. It’s enough to fill you with encouragement, and also shrink you in comparison (the thief of joy).

Get a project, a friend suggests.

It’s your fallow season, consoles another.

Yes and yes, both make sense. I love the focus of a project, such as the Poetry Postcard Fest, and Sweet Grief, and Weilworks collaborations.

But I also value the quiet season, a time of puddle and mull. I’m betwixt and between. Not here or there, but in the search and on the way.

“What is the meaning of life?” writer Virginia Woolf asked in To The Lighthouse.

“The great revelation perhaps never did come,” she wrote. “Instead there were only little daily miracles, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”

Yes! And so, as I wait, I still make.

*The Most Important* *Things* by Drew Myron

It’s advice that writer Sarah Cook offers, too:

“You have enough time to write,” she urges in For the Birds, a Substack newsletter.

“Short, frequent instances of contact with your creativity are extremely valuable. The modern average attention span is 40 seconds. FOUR. FUCKING. ZERO.

Okay then! Write for 40 goddamn seconds. Write for EIGHTY seconds, if you’re feeling really saucy. . .

If you wish you had more time to write, start with anything more than nothing. Anything more than nothing is good! This advice can be applied to any creative endeavor / most goals.”

With that energy, I’ve been taking short bursts of time — 10 minutes, an hour, an afternoon — to make a medley of image and words, texture and color.

Maybe it’s collage, maybe it’s poem. Maybe it’s a creative exercise, or just a good stretch. But mostly, it feels good to strike a match and see what burns.

What are you making?

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