Day 6 of 30: Embracing the In-Between

& a prompt on home as a foreign place by Mari Andrew

Today’s prompt is the third we ever shared and one of my all-time favorites.

It’s by my friend Mari Andrew, whose striking illustrations and poignant commentary on Instagram caught my eye long before we met. What started as a daily creative practice during a season of grief (sound familiar, anyone?) has led Mari to countless unexpected places—like the New York Times bestseller list.

Revisiting her prompt presses me to take a harder look at everything. I wonder, How has staying at home for a year changed my conception of home? What’s the same, and what’s different? What does home feel like these days? And how does it feel to be out in the world?

So many of us are living in the messy middle right now. We’re just starting to emerge from a year of severe limitation, starting to have more choices. Since I’m fully vaccinated and my parents are too, I visited them for Easter. When I arrived, I didn’t hesitate when I hugged my mother—and that was a wonderful relief and surprise. But I’m still wary of so many things. I find myself preserving a level of caution, keeping my social circle small, still grabbing handles with my shirt sleeves, still avoiding crowded or enclosed spaces.

Here on this threshold, on the verge of venturing out, we’re revisiting Mari’s prompt—about looking at our homes with fresh eyes, about noticing what it’s like to be there anew. I’ll also be hosting Mari for a Studio Visit this Sunday, April 11, at 1pm ET. We’ll be talking about embracing the in-between and creative surprise. 

To join us, become a paid subscriber, and grab a copy of her new book My Inner Sky if you can!

Sending love from the in-between place,

Suleika

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This Foreign Place by Mari Andrew

We are all going through collective culture shock right now. We are oh-so-quickly adjusting to a whole new way of going through the world: interpreting distance as kindness, embracing solitude for the sake of community, and advocating for stasis as a means of progress. It's wild and weird. This is a brand new land where none of us have ever been, even though most of us are at home.

I've been thinking a lot about how this experience parallels traveling to a new place, where cultural norms are totally different, our daily routines are out of whack, and we have jet lag from lack of/too much sleep. We have to celebrate differently, mourn differently, even dress differently.

One of the many things I find valuable about travel is that it naturally deprives us of many of our daily comforts and crutches, which in turn makes us more attentive and attuned to what's going on, externally and internally. Who am I exactly without my automatic coffee maker, reliable wifi, my community at home? Some deprivations are more drastic than others, but even the little ones have something to teach us about ourselves (the lesson might be: 'I love my coffee maker.' Perfectly good lesson!).

Of course, deprivation is a whole lot easier to stomach when you're also exploring a beautiful foreign land, meeting new people, and incorporating interesting rituals into your day. I'd gladly swap my usual home coffee routine for a morning stroll to get a darling demitasse of café con leche from the friendly old man down the block.

Right now, we're deprived of so much (sense of stability and safety being the most overwhelming) and we're incorporating so many new ways of being into our lives and emotional landscapes. This is helpful for me to remember when I feel like my soul is living somewhere different than my body—she hasn't caught up yet.

Your prompt for today:

Write a travel journal entry from your home, could be your living room, could be your bed. Write as though you've just arrived in a new place and what you're observing about the place and how you feel in it. Write what you see, hear, and touch, as though it's all brand new. What are you learning about yourself in this different land, with all its deprivations? 

If you'd like to turn this into a visual entry, draw a map complete with notes about this foreign land's customs, rituals, and routines.

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