It’s my belief that every birthday you should go see the ocean. There’s something about taking that step into another year and going to a place that’s so much more than you. More space, more power, more calm - timeless and endless. Most of the time I take at least one photograph. Not necessarily anything fancy, sometimes just the random stuff that photographers get caught by. I feel like this ritual connects me to the passage of time with attention to the day and preparation for the upcoming year.
For some artists there is little difference between ritual and routine. The painter who turns on classical music and paints for several hours each morning, the writer who gets up early, pours a cup of coffee and sits down to write…maybe the first draft by hand… etc. These are blends of ritual and routine. My life just never seems to fit into any type of predictable pattern to create a routine - so I rely on ritual to slip me into the creative process. If I’m going to be doing image-making, then it must be in the morning and before I can start, I slowly clean/clear up my studio space. For some reason, I must start at the entrance and then move clockwise around the room. Just the experience of stacking papers and clearing surfaces, attention and preparation, seems to echo within and by the end, I’m ready to start working.
One of my favorite books on the topic is Mason Currey’s second book Daily Rituals Women at Work. It’s an engaging read - Isabel Allende starts each new book on January 8th while Lillian Hellman started each day milking cows and cleaning out the barn (then smoked 3 packs of cigarettes and drank 20+ cups of coffee throughout the day!). Art 21 has a video series on artists’ Routines and Rituals, and Twyla Tharp shares her practice in The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It For Life. Here’s Joan Didion’s response when asked if she had any writing rituals:
“The most important is that I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I’ve done that day. I can’t do it late in the afternoon because I’m too close to it. Also, the drink helps. It removes me from the pages. So I spend this hour taking things out and putting other things in. Then I start the next day by redoing all of what I did the day before.” Paris Match, 1978.
Happy Birthday! Your ritual sounds lovely and compelling to do the same myself!
Wonderful post! Happy birthday, Ann!