Writing in the Margins

on creativity + pouring from an empty cup

Welcome to Slow Folk - a community for gentle hearts and rebellious creatives, thirsty for a slower life in a world obsessed with speed. Notes and reflections from a decade + of life in the Slow Lane. If you’re ready to push back against busy to build a life of purpose and presence-over-perfection - please join me.

Welcome to the Unbusy Revolution.

Morning everyone. I have been absent from both my writing desk and your inbox of late. Even now, with the tepid light of a rainy morning weakly streaming into my writing nook, these are stollen moments.

The disorientation of the recent change in our family’s life has left me fumbling blindly for my creative process, only weeks ago so constant and sure. It’s made me think about that old adage we so often slather unasked-for onto exhausted and frayed mothers -

You can’t pour from an empty cup.

It’s true, isn’t it? And I certainly have found myself saying it - to myself at least. But also . . . Mamas, tell me, maybe you feel this way, too -

Doesn’t is also make you want to punch the speaker right in the junk?

Cause, who’s gonna do the pouring to refill it?

Ya, you’re lookin’ at her. Right? Right.

So what are we to do, when our cup does not overfloweth, and yet we want to go on pouring and making and creating and simply feeling like our whole, precious selves in moments of turmoil or simply too much?

I’ve been turning this question over in my hands for the past few weeks as I strive to make sense of my recent disorientation.

How do we protect those tender, sacred spaces of creation? How do we show up for ourselves without doing too much? How do we say YES to ourselves and the things that matter when there are just so gosh darn many things on that list - most of which WE didn’t put there?

How can we be expected to pour into the cups of others when we are so. damn. thirsty. ourselves?

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But then again - I wonder, if maybe, it isn’t a cup we pour from at all?

After all, you’re so much more than a puny tea cup, are you not? You may be tender, but you are not fragile, bones of china, waiting - breathless - to shatter.

You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the ocean in one drop. - Rumi

What if your creativity, wholeness, rapturous being is not something finite to be topped up by some external measure, by some added thing on your ever-growing to-do list or a phoney commercial act of ‘self-care’?

What if you aren’t an empty tea cup waiting to be filled?

What if you’re a spring?

What if your truth lies cool and quiet, deep in a vast cavernous space beneath the earth, carved quietly with strength and patience, ever regenerating by a magic of geological time? A process that we neither control nor understand, but which nonetheless keeps our subterranean pools ever filled, ever flowing?

We may temporarily exhaust our reservoirs, but we are never truly empty.

Maybe what is required is not refilling or pouring or stupid ‘self-care’.

What is required is time and patience and trust. Trust in self. Trust in the impossible vastness of our being. Belief in the cavernous, quiet spaces tucked like pearls within the escarpment of our souls, waiting.

What if, even if we can’t drink from it, even if that teetering porcelain on our heads comes up empty - it doesn’t mean that WE are empty?

We may be tired or afraid or unsure what the future holds. But who says this has to be a season of pouring? Who says that cup ought to be full all the time? Who says life should be without fear, or fatigue or uncertainty?

I am not the emptiness and I am not the cup.

Neither, my love, are you.

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As for me, I’ve set my empty cup on the shelf where it belongs.

I may not be able to lie down in the cool shade of the tall grass where my spring bubbles at the moment, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there, quietly going about it’s mundane magic.

It doesn’t require me to do anything, be anything, fill anything in order for it to be.

When life requires us to scratch around the edges of our creative selves, or set them down altogether, it does not mean they have abandoned us. Those parts of ourselves never leave.

Look at me - gone 20 years since art school. 20 years of working, mothering, losing myself in the creative act of motherhood in all its pain and beauty and necessary erasure of even bodily autonomy, my boundaries dissolving in the lamplight of late night feeds . . . and yet. And yet.

Here we are. My words have not left me. Here they manifest, dancing across the ether to you. My paintbrushes still send electric sparks of joy thrilling up my hand at the sheer delight of paint on paper.

It never left me.

So, smash the empty cup if you have to.

Your brightness of being cannot be held by such a tiny vessel. You are too vast, too miraculous, to be contained by such a quotidian cup.

Sip from your spring in stollen moments if you have to. Write in the margins, in stollen scraps of time - like I am now, between making breakfast and soccer games and kid’s birthday parties and whatever it is you have to do to keep the lights on.

Those tiny sips still matter.

And if the trips to dip your hands in the cool water and cup them to your mouth are few and far between, well, that’s ok, too.

Nothing in nature blooms all year.

There. 11:30 pm. I wrote about writing in the margins, in the margins. How apt. Some seasons are for resting and some are for pushing through. May we be granted the wisdom to know where we plant our feet.

As always.

Stacey

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Stacey Langford is a writer, renegade farmer and slow business mentor living and working in Canada’s Fraser Valley. In 2010 Stacey ditched her cubicle in the city to turn her attention homeward, farm and help others craft a simple life, from scratch.

Are you ready to build a life - and a living - you actually love?

I help rebellious solopreneurs and creatives build businesses rooted in Slow Values. If you’re ready to step into your own Slow Life and finally claim your calling, let’s chat!