Tag: retreats

self-care for creatives

The Economy of Favors

Long before I cared at all about global value exchange, I was passionately concerned with others’ happiness.

I collected stickers that other kids liked, gleefully waiting for the playground trading floor that opened up spontaneously between jax tournaments. My trapper keeper notebook came away looking ragged. Satisfyingly so, as I had deftly distributed the very best stickers I could find for those I knew would love them. These were amusing entanglements among mates in the quest for puff, sparkle, and shazaam! I loved the stickers for their design and dazzle, and I liked giving them away even more.

Now I keep an eye out for busy colleagues who need a grocery drop-off. I aim for an unexpected gift when stuck in the mud of love. I pull dissertation committees down from hot, high air. A draft memo to a circle of colleagues may deliver only two ounces of understanding.  Perhaps meant to go unpublished, but it can’t be unwritten.

With a measure of my career in the rear view, I can see the pattern clearly. There are certain operators (I am one) who utilize commonplace principles like ‘pay it forward’ to precede and preset conditions for all sorts of value generation – personal, social, educational, cultural, environmental, and yes, economic.

Like my forbears, I trade in social tender. I move stickers, share burden through fractional householding, and provide dedicated defense lines for cultural workers. I have been described as the person you call when no one else responds. The potent values produced in my work are expressed in others’ progress, well beyond my own expertise or control. My best investments rarely appear in revenue projections or on balance sheets, despite these conditions being essential to operations and long-term equity.

I put appreciation, curiosity, and joy into an amalgam of shared silence, listening, and careful inquiry. I get my reward in warm text updates and hand-written thank you cards after a big transition or transformation. What happens next keeps me in professional awe.

Washington Writer’s Retreat is an example of my efforts to blend generosity into the value exchange of an enterprise, not just a practice I do in other parts of life. I wanted to test an economic theory that it was possible to deal transactionally with non-negotiable values in a way that generated novel resources in predictable and unpredictable ways.

It mattered that I opened my own home to research scholars without much regard for the costs; whatever they could comfortably afford. Simply saying so made room for quieter conversations that always guided us closer to getting the most out of a stay.

I listened as deeper intentions were revealed through progress. That often led to critical breakthroughs, or sometimes a crushing rupture. Hosting the retreat was an effort to feed and comfort people who were furiously proposal-ing to great consequence. NSF grants flew out the digitals windows with my cats contentedly lap-napping. Three babies appeared while all that art and science was also happening.

I can fill volumes with what was necessary for creative work to commence. Coffee, of course, and a pillow upgrade. Windows that opened and temperatures just so. The largest room had red walls. No way for one writer, no matter how big the desk.

One artist couple took over the kitchen with epic relish. Then, they abandoned the greasy worktops to the meticulous lab scientists also in residence. The latter are chosen family, having rescued me from a dozen other mishaps in those days. Their longer stewardship of the retreat let me fall in love with Louise, halfway around the world.

The retreat was contemporary with AirBNB as a fresh business model in the sharing economy, though at a very different scale. I was an early host on the then-new platform that boasted an active DC network, and the only operator focused on longer stays involving writing and research. VRBO was just getting started as a sabbatical swap. I wanted to host, and serve as an outpost reporter. I managed the house as a creative space in those heady days when experiential and shared economies met with door-opening technologies that changed the global economy forever, most especially in the cultural tourism industries.

In developing the retreat, I also related closely to the many strains of tradition that came before me. I leaned into familial habits of communal cultures, adopting and adapting those many ways that immigrating generations host each other for short study trips and longer sojourns into their personal and professional futures. I looked at the formal study and cultural exchanges that already abound in the DC region, a nation’s capital replete with opportunity though bereft of kindness, somedays.

Many artist retreats around the world informed me (formal and informal, past and present) along with my own road trips and self-directed residencies in the US, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia.

I read a lot about Depression-era housing, when the only way to keep ownership was to share space. I stood over the stove top, making a new soup of my assets. Boiling an old carcass down to the nourishing bone.

It turns out that commodifying the obvious parts of the experience (without sense for the ineffable) reverses certain parts of the original value exchange. In today’s shared economy, instead of humble and curious guests, we’re often greedy jerks with high expectations of our anonymous hosts. As hosts, we can accidentally trade in the facsimile of experience. The super-powered subscription models are largely unaware of the babies they dumped out of the bathwater. There is also a need to be entirely inefficient with oneself and others.

I can hear you worrying about me. Attachment, enmeshment, boundaries, and bad actors. Dollars are crisp curators of fair value. Why blur the lines? When I moved into the dank basement of my own home, I left the full upstairs to the retreat. For me, it was more privacy and a separate bathroom. A family member called with real concern. What was I losing in my quality of life? What amount of self-effacement is too much? She knew her line, and I had crossed it.

I have gained in life by being this way. In Liz Lerman’s time, the Dance Exchange had a prompt, What are you in praise of? It is calming to me as a secular Buddhist to rest my praiseful gaze outside myself. I walk through the world appreciatively, not because I deny suffering or my own self-worth. Rather, I smile in our shared trials and triumphs, only half-knowing the tug of my own. We all have something undiscovered.

Latent value is a secret stash in the economy of favors. Having listened over time, we know a friend’s need better than our own. We are studied in how to caringly deliver in the right way. We can arrive at a precise moment previously unknown and help put the dots together again.

So it was with the retreat, where every engagement began in potent mystery about our short time together. What would a ‘love first, ask questions’ approach beget? What value would I find in it for me, now and so many years later?

Well, I kept my house in the midst of a global market meltdown. I wrote a lot, much of it still in the drawer. Cats died, new ones arrived. I came to the now-obvious conclusion that animals make humans better. It was the Washington Writers with Cats Retreat, if I’m honest.

I studied creative practice intensely – improving my own, supporting others, reading about it, teaching, coaching, and toiling in community dilemmas.

Cooking and eating among friends has to be the greatest gift. The smells, sounds, tastes of all those worlds mingling – nothing I could have imagined and a bank of memories I linger in still.

Yes, I now see how friendly favors were the pond drops that rippled out. I owned the house, only a small part of all that is ours to keep.

Akimbo, and other words for nowhere in particular

Headed back to DC soon with springtime plans to attend the Emerging Arts Leaders Symposium.

I want to catch up with ARTOMATIC a lot — either in the building or with artists friends in the wild. Maybe that’s better. Outdoors is the new black.

Also, make minutes into days under the cherry blossoms at the Tidal Basin. Search out the secret spots that DC dwellers don’t tell. We will enter and exit Virginia by tangled freeways several times. Never how we intended.

I make change professionally. Personally, I get on the struggle bus, too. Yes, I have come to love and anticipate the shifts that our peripatetic lifestyle requires. I like it more with a couple good cries. The upset in time and space is habitual in our marriage now. I still react to it like a toddler who had her room remodeled.

My own steady these days comes from writing routine. Lately, I’ve admired essayists who play the alphabet for prompts. Advice from Kay Flavell, an epic traveler herself, comes back. She experienced a driving urge to synthesize all she’d learned in the middle of her life.

The period can be aptly called purgatory, but I went looking for more words to describe the anticipatory stasis in between here and there, now and then, life and death, you and me. You know, the easy ones. What is the word for not quite anywhere?

Actually, I first looked up nothingness. Among the synonyms, limbo most closely applies. My days are full of activities. Taking care of the house and bills, time with Dad, and adventures with friends and family. Life is full, and upside down. I’m in limbo, entirely akimbo to the person I knew myself to be. Also, walking distance from who I was a long time ago.

The social jet lag is wicked. Sitting next to my father, time is painfully fleeting, and I get lost in the century span in our patio chats. After that, he sleeps. All that can be said freely between us (and what I can make of it in quiet writing) affirms that I will go to even fewer stale air committee meetings.

Grief is professional, too. I love and miss my compatriots who do the grind. I hit a nicotine vape recently and remembered why I enjoyed smoking as a teenager and also why I quit. My old career felt just like that rush. The reasons to change are similar, too. Both felt great and made me sick.

My bookshelf is one way I grasp the past and pull it forward. I started by looking closely at what I’ve read, musing about the time and place I first encountered the author, book, or idea. My thoughts about it then, and how it sits now. Reworking my own threads in both distance and close view. It’s lovely. I’m excited to say my first book is Carl Honore, In Praise of Slowness, Challenging the Cult of Speed. I’ll put up the link and my take, sometime.

I’m reminded of a favorite tune, The Speed of the Sound of Loneliness. Now, I’m off to the gym to stay as long as possible. Music always helps.

To Each Their Own

Prompts this week are tying back to the Washington Writer’s Retreat, a five-year social engagement among a community of writers and artists. More than thirty scholars stayed in my home in Mount Rainier, Maryland, and we sat around my table often.

Creative practice became central to the experience. Its importance, what it is, and how it is done. The short answer is: uniquely. Of course, there are patterns that follow notable texts and teachers. The upclose view at the retreat included interesting deviations.

For example, a prolific historian was the model of stoic discipline. He stayed for six weeks. Each day, he got up, drank one cup of coffee, exercised, worked on his own projects in the morning, ate a modest lunch, and took afternoon phone calls.

His routine was deliberate and consistent. Importantly, it worked for him. He was on his eighth academic tome.

As host, I was witness to it all. From my perch, his routine was rigid and exhausting. I relished my daily opportunity to sleep in as needed and had happily tucked the necessities of each day around my own amusements. I loved it when guests left, not for the goodbyes but because flipping a room is the perfect time to listen to music, dance, and fuss the day away. It was a secret pleasure.

Months later, another academic stayed in that same room. She mostly toodled on her bike, exploring the city with her sister and niece. We all knew she had a massive book proposal to write. No matter, she filled an ice chest with luscious lunches, taking successive days in what appeared to be vacation mode.

Having a project and doing it was part of the invitation to stay at the retreat. A vacation in DC wasn’t precisely the point. I grew suspect. In the days before Airbnb, I was careful to bake integrity, trust, purpose, and focus into the decision to invite a guest. As a social exchange, building a reputation of productivity around the retreat was also important to me.

Then she came home one day, parked her bike, wrote the proposal, packed up, and drove off. The book was quickly greenlit and is now done. She’s doing field research on women’s health in Africa. Perhaps it was me who missed the point.

In reflection, the greater insight is apparent. Every person who stayed had their own way of working. Some sat with me in blissful chatter for hours over a simple soup. Others cocooned behind a closed door. Turns out one or two folks just needed a place to be. That was ok, too.