Taking a Creative Leap

On Mind-Blowing Books and Birds

Welcome to Pocketful of Prose! My intention in writing these pockets is to offer a sacred space where writing leads to better living. Pocketful of Prose is free for everyone, so please share with friends. If you want to support this publication, you can do so by becoming a paid subscriber. If you make it all the way to the end of this post, there’s a magical video you won’t want to miss. Please also stick around for some conversation in the comments. What’s blowing your mind? What sparks your creativity? Are the birds in the photos sparrows or wrens? (A lot is at stake in our family over this, so answer wisely).

Without further ado, today’s pocket. I finished two books this week that were honestly kind of mind blowing. The first was Big Magic by Liz Gilbert. There are people that get hype, and you kind of wonder what the hype is all about, and then there are people that get hype, and when you experience their work or hear them talk, you think, wow, they don’t even get half the hype they deserve. After finishing Big Magic, I would say that Liz Gilbert fits into that latter category for me. The book is about cultivating creative living, and it’s brilliant. One of the things Liz suggests doing is treating creativity like a lover, like a date, inviting it over, dressing for the occasion, making yourself over into someone creativity would want to spend time with. So I’m giving that a go this pocket. I have put on an actual bra, not a mom or teacher bra. I’m wearing a shirt that is floral and fun and a beaded necklace with an amazonite stone that is supposed to inspire you to speak your truest truth, or at least this is what the clerk at the thrift store told me. I just looked up amazonite, and it doesn’t appear to look like the stone necklace I’m wearing, but I don’t care. It’s pretty and fun. I haven’t worn perfume since high school, but I dab a little eucalyptus oil behind my ears. I turn on the small water fountain on our porch for it’s soothing sounds, and I sit on my balcony beckoning creativity like Juliet beckoned Romeo. I’m not sure about creativity, but I do attract the attention of a few moths. I think it might be the eucalyptus.

Liz debunks the idea that artists need to suffer, which is good because it would be hard for me to write a Substack on how writing leads to better living if writing was premised on suffering. But there are still many people out there, famous artists and writers included, who connect art with suffering and suggest that one hinges on the other. Liz says that in order to let go of this idea of creative suffering, we must reject the martyr and embrace the trickster. “Martyr energy is dark, solemn, macho, hierarchical, fundamentalist, austere, unforgiving, and profoundly rigid. Trickster energy is light, sly, transgender, transgressive, animist, seditious, primal, and endlessly shape-shifting” (Big Magic).

Can I create from martyr energy? Yes. Might it be more fun to try and create from trickster energy? The amazonite and eucalyptus oil are nodding their approval, and so are the moths.

Which brings me to the second mind blowing book I finished this week, Nature’s Best Hope by Douglas Tallamy. Tallamy makes a strong case for why we should all turn some of our space back over to nature and create what he calls Homegrown National Park. Think Talking Heads “Nothing but Flowers” meets Robin Wall Kimmerer, who by the way is friends with Liz Gilbert. The universe sometimes makes sense. Tallamy shares that many of our current gardens contain invasive species which may look pretty, but serve little purpose in maintaining a healthy ecosystem. He suggests that we remove invasive species that are harmful and instead plant native flowers and plants, particularly paying attention to keystone species, on which so much life depends.

Homegrown National Park has become a passion project for me this summer, a bit of an obsession, one might say, that either makes me a super interesting person to talk to at a dinner party or the opposite, but I don’t care. I don’t attend dinner parties anyway. I just dress up and write on my balcony and seriously nerd out on all the Native plants that grow in my part of the world and all the butterflies, moths, caterpillars and birds that depend on them.

When I visit with my garden now, I feel like I am seeing her through new eyes. She and I are an old married couple whose kids have just left the nest, and we are discovering each other again for the first time. Each day, there are new gifts to discover. Here are photos of my joyful discoveries.

I was planning to write more extensively about homegrown national park, but as I was working on this week’s pocket, nature had other plans. The family of birds that has been sharing our lake cabin with us for the past month or so decided it was time to leave the nest. If you have never witnessed baby birds taking their first flight, it is as incredible and magical as it sounds, just like Liz Gilbert. We have a small wooden birdhouse on our porch at the lake that birds make a home in every year.

If you want to make your home more inviting to this kind of magic, I encourage you to check out Tallamy’s book, or any of the resources I share at the bottom of this post. My Substack friend Misti Little did a great interview with Nancy Lawson that I would highly recommend and am linking here. You can also check out Nancy’s website, at humanegardener.com. Another Substack friend, Sara by the Season, links some handy dandy resources in her episode Recovering the Knowing, including a link where you can learn more about the keystone plants in your area. I found this super helpful when I was wanting to add some more Native plants to my garden.

And now this pocket will officially be for the birds. As Mary Oliver says in her poem “Sometimes,” “Instructions for living a life: Pay Attention, Be Astonished. Tell about it.”

Here is what I paid attention to. Here is what astonished me. Here is the poem I wrote to capture it all. (I revised said poem with my newly acquired trickster energy. I highly recommend it.)

First Flight

One by one

The baby birds poke their heads out of the tiny little birdhouse

It is time

Yesterday, all they had to do was open their small mouths

everything belonged to them

Today, their world is forever changed

The first one, the bold one, pushes past the others and flies first

The others take their time

Placing one careful claw in front of another

A few times they change their mind

and turn back

But time cannot turn back

Even when we desire it to do so

The little one holds on

until there is nothing left to hold on to

Sometimes leaping is all that is left

and we are the most brave because we have to be

The last one is the most uncertain

and I love her all the more for this

Instead of leaping she climbs on the roof of the house

and jumps to the railing of the deck

Imagine a belly flop for birds

A teaser for the video below. This little guy landed on Seabass

Scruffy, fat and ruffled,

she aims for the sky, but returns to the deck

She walks to the edge until there is nowhere else to walk

and then lets herself fall

and falling becomes flying

As she remembers what she has always known

She is a bird

And I think of you in your grief and wonder if there’s something here for you

a whisper perhaps of who you are, who you have always been and who you will become

Sometimes leaping is all that is left

and we are the most brave because we have to be

and perhaps if we let ourselves fall

We too will remember we know how to fly

Thanks for sticking with me. Here’s the video I took, which captures our astonishment. Enjoy!