Embodiment

Dear Creator,

If we were sitting across from each other in a coffee shop, warm mugs between our hands, we're at the point in the conversation where I'd lean in and say: Embodiment is where creativity gets real.

I know plenty of things I don't always live. I can believe I am enough and still let an unfinished to-do list make me feel like I'm failing. I can have an idea I'm wildly excited about and keep it floating around like a beautiful cloud rather than risk letting it touch the ground. I can know what matters to me and still catch myself editing who I am depending on who is in the room. Knowing something and inhabiting it are not quite the same thing.

Then there is this body we are doing all of it in. This actual human body that gets tired, laughs until its shoulders shake, gets sick, gets older, and reaches for someone it loves. I have spent plenty of my life pushing mine, managing it, and wishing it would simply cooperate so I could get back to my life. It took me a surprisingly long time to hear what was strange about that sentence. As though my body weren't my life too.

A tiny nudge toward true north. One small course correction that barely seems consequential until another follows it, and then another. Eventually you look around and realize you are no longer merely imagining the life. You are standing in it.

This is where your creativity grows legs and walks into the world. Where the beautiful cloud finally touches the ground. Where something that was once invisible becomes part of an actual human life. Yours.

Creatively yours,
Ansley