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Email Read Time: 60 seconds
Pause/Prompt/Practice Time: 15 minutes Announcements: —I accidentally scheduled this for 5:20pm! Here it is! Sorry about that! —This week’s Daily Nourishment Pauses, Prompts, and Practices are brand new contributions from Lauren F. Winner. (Thanks, Lauren!) —AND Lauren will be leading an online Christmastide Retreat on Wednesday, 12/27 & Monday, 1/1. Both retreats are identical. Anyone who registers can attend one retreat or both. Cost is $49 with SDW Members receiving 50% off. Learn more and register here.
—Did you see the announcement about the online Thoughtful Readers Gatherings featuring Cole Arthur Riley, Crystal Wilkinson, Kaveh Akbar, and more great authors?
—Our next SDW Co-Writing Session is on Friday from 8 a.m.-noon CT. Learn more and register here. SDW Members receive 50% off.
—Thanks so much for subscribing to SDW Daily Nourishment!
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A Note from Lauren:
Earlier this month, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York wound down its exhibit of 50 pieces — paintings, drawings — by Cecily Brown. Our Pauses, Prompts, and Practices this week all take Brown’s art, and her insight into art, as our jumping off point.
For today’s Pause/Prompt/Practice, please have at the ready a piece of writing you finished a week, month, year, or decade ago. It could be a paragraph or poem; it could be an essay, story, or book. It could be a letter, email, or recipe.
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Pause.Speaking to The Guardian in 2009 – the feature is pleasingly titled “Cecily Brown: I take things too far when painting” — Brown said “once I stopped caring quite so much about where I fitted in, and whether it made any sense to be painting, I started getting more and more absorbed in it.” |
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Have you come to the place in your life where you don’t care quite so much about whether, or if, you fit in? If so, how did you get to that place? If not, does the idea of arriving there appeal to you? Frighten you? Intrigue you?
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Prompt.In the same feature, Brown goes on to say “I've discovered that the more I paint, the more I want to paint. The longer I go on doing it, the more I have to say and do. You pose a certain set of questions in one group of paintings and you want to answer them in the next. One body of work leads naturally to the next - you sort of feed off yourself. It's a question of accepting the limits of painting and trying to be as imaginative and expansive as possible within those boundaries.” |
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I do not know if Brown is religious, but the notion of creativity and expansiveness being decidedly possible inside a set of limits that one has accepted sounds to me like an insight into liturgy. Perhaps also an insight into marriage? Into embodiment? When have you experienced finding expansiveness within a set of limits?
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Practice.Brown’s notion that one group of paintings poses a “set of questions” that “you want to answer…in the next” suggests that making art is wonderfully self-generating. |
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Look over a piece of writing that you have finished. What question or questions yet unanswered does the piece pose? Set a timer for ten minutes. Then pen (or keyboard) in hand, begin addressing the question or questions.
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Lauren WinnerLauren F. Winner writes and lectures widely on Christian practice, the history of Christianity in America, and Jewish-Christian relations. Her books include Girl Meets God, Mudhouse Sabbath, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God, and most recently, The Dangers of Christian Practice: On Wayward Gifts, Characteristic Damage, and Sin. spiritualdirectionforwriters.com |
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