Retreat Day 3. Compassionate Self-Reflection

lizshine74by lizshine74

In Retreat.

picture of a zine made by Liz Shine about how to make time to be creative

Written in the second person as an incantation to the self as this home retreat comes to a close.

Focus will be harder today, give yourself grace. It’s Christmas Eve. There’s a time crunch. By the evening, you’ll be tending to other people’s needs. The plane carrying your spouse home right now will have landed and he’ll have stories to tell. It’s good you started the day with a yoga class, and now you are sitting at your desk moving and cutting words in poems. Stand back and take a different view. There is a lot to go. You probably won’t make your second goal today but look at how much closer you will be. Take one step further back to the start of this retreat. Be grateful for the space you created in your work by putting in this time.

Don’t set any timers today. Just keep making the time as you move through the day taking whatever breaks you need to. Consider the time in between writing and how that fuels the writing. Let the boundaries blur. Consider all the practices that bolster the building of word worlds. How can you be in the practice even more?

Thanks for following me through this home retreat, friends. I shared it here as always to inspire you in making time for the creative work of your soul. The work that calls you and that makes and unmakes you. You were born for this.

I also work as a writing coach and love helping writers gain confidence, set goals, and develop their work. For more information on coaching, email me at eatyourwords.lizshine@gmail.com.

lizshine74

lizshine74

Liz Shine teaches high school English, writes, edits, and coaches other writers from her home in Olympia, WA. When she begins to feel overwhelmed by it all, she simply looks up at Mount Rainier in the distance and gets back to work. If that fails, she heads to the ocean. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press. Her Substack Make Time is her gift to writers, like her, trying to magic time in this crazy, busy world. All of those posts are cross-posted on the blog here. You can see more of her writing at lizshine.com and find her on Instagram {@lizshine.writer} cooking, traveling, and in other ways seeking moments of awe. She has been an active participant in communities of writers since the early 1990s. She’s learned that two things feel truly purpose-driven in life: writing and coaching other writers. In the in between (because one cannot be driving for a purpose every moment), she enjoys looking for wonder and connection. She is a lifelong yoga student, an enthusiastic walker along streets and trails, and an amateur gardener and vegetarian cook. She lives in Olympia, WA in the USA. She believes in the power of practice and has been practicing writing since some time in the early 90s when she became an adult in the rain-soaked city of Aberdeen. Writing began with journaling, as a way to understand a confusing, sometimes violent coming-of-age. She writes mostly fiction, some nonfiction, and poetry, and holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writers Workshop. She has published in Shark Reef, Dual Coast, and Blue Crow Magazine. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press.