Find Your Place of Ease

Why creativity still matters | The healing power of enchantment

Greetings from the moss,

I recently read the plaque on the bench that I regularly pass and discovered that we are the same age. I’m not sure which of us is weathering better, my own flaking layers of paint are perhaps better concealed.

In the absence of certainty, I connect to the things that help me to cope. This is what I have previously referred to as small beauty, and I now realise that it is also enchantment. I hope that my words and images extend this gift, this small moment of ease, to you:

Everybody needs beauty, as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul. – John Muir

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Years always seem to accelerate as they get into their stride. It’s another one where creativity feels like a luxury; there are so many things to worry about, both global and local. I touched on this in an Instagram post back in late February 2022:

I carried the shadow around with me on my walk today; it nested in my stomach while the sun shone. I tried looking at the world upside down to see if it made any difference. It didn’t. I envied the roe deer the spring in their step, white bounce, brown flash. By the end of it the grey wind had won and the snow had started to fall. Even tears freeze today.

What I wrote at the time, the week that Russia invaded Ukraine, still holds true and the world has since seen new conflicts. Suffering and worry only seem to worsen. It still pains me, but I have become a little better at balancing my conflicting thoughts which at the time left me feeling guilty about allocating moments to any sort of art, and unable to feel joy at the coming spring.

One thing that helped me with this, immeasurably, came as I started to re-read Nan Shepherd’s ‘The Living Mountain’. In her introduction, Nan writes about working on her manuscript for the book during the latter years of the Second World War and just after:

“In that disturbed and uncertain world it was my secret place of ease.”

How I wish I’d chosen to reread the book in Spring 2020, as the pandemic spread. It’s not lost on me either that at first reading the sentence had floated over me.

How sad too that prevailing circumstances persuaded Nan to put her manuscript away in a drawer for 30 years. To think that such a wonderfully poetic book about place and nature might not have been published.

I resolved not to put my own creativity away in the drawer. It makes too much difference to my happiness. It, and nature, provides me with my own place of ease. As each year seems to bring new sadness, new uncertainty, I hope that you have a place of ease, or safety rope, that you are able to hold onto, and meantime I extend my own to you.

And into the woods I go, to lose my mind and find my soul. – John Muir

Thank you for reading. You are welcome to forward this letter to someone you think may welcome a brief encounter with nature.

Until next week,

If you find that one of my letters especially resonates, there’s an option to leave a few coins in the jar as a one-off donation to support the craft of writing and evolving FLOW: Letters from the Moss.

Encore:

Dipping into the archive, I again find that I am subconsciously walking the same way. Here are two small extracts - if you’d like to read the full post you’ll find it here.

Today I found pleasure in a clump of heather, opened up like a shell as if to bask in the absent sun.  Pink froth around its edge, the centre relaxed in senescence. Lichen growing on old wood. Moss soft furnishing the mound below.  Last night’s rain adding sparkle to plant and decorating the umbrellas of webs that appear so prominently as if to catch summer’s end.

I have again been out in an attempt to to catch summer’s end, and this is something I will return to and share in a future letter.

I prepared this week’s draft before returning to last year’s letter. Perhaps it is serendipity that I find common thread:

Softness suffuses the majority of images that I make. I’ve looked into and photographed water for so long now that it shapes my view of nature more broadly. If I want sharp edges all I have to do is read the news... This is my sanctuary, my meditation, my place of ease. I hope you will find a little tranquility here too, and if you enjoy the feel of this vision of the natural world you’ll find more on my website.

All words and images copyright © Michela Griffith except where otherwise noted