Field Notes For Practice | December 2023

Curated inspiration and a little irreverence from my practice to yours.

Photo by Hulki Okan Tabak

That's why the word practice is so important to me. Yes, it’s about the sense of a professional attitude to the work I can do in and for the world rather than establishing a profit-and-growth-focused business. But it’s also about the repetition, the life built from small repeated movements towards a clear purpose. It’s about how creativity builds from small movements just as a whirling dance of an hour is stitched together from thousands of rotations lasting only seconds each. It’s about its impact on my well-being, my presence, my relationships, my experience of this ‘one wild and precious life’ as well as the hope that I might impact others. -

Helen Conway

Why Don’t Whirling Dervishes Fall Down? If you’ve ever witnessed or participated in this Sufi ritual trance tradition, you know it’s at once concentrated and ecstatic — a fitting metaphor for cultivating equilibrium in any creative pursuit. A favorite recent essay on Substack.

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Admittedly, I’m not much of a pop culture consumer. I’m not a Swiftie and I missed the Hamilton train by like a year. Choosing to watch gratuitous violence is inconceivable to me. I do appreciate any artistic expression that inspires some deeper sense of resonance, of connection. After watching American Symphony, I wanted to disappear inside a jazz album and my journal. That’s a good sign. For those who haven’t yet seen this documentary that accompanies married couple

Suleika Jaouad

and Jon Baptiste through a year of intimate, wrenching extremes: it is gorgeous, vulnerable, and humanly stirring. I was particularly moved by the tenet of survival as a creative act — how we embody the artistry of our lives as a fundamental healing practice.

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Finding Light in Winter. A glimmer wrapped in a New York Times op-ed by Mary Pipher, clinical psychologist and author of “A Life in Light: Meditations on Impermanence.”

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Books are an invitation to the hearth at this time of year. Nestle into David Sedaris’ Holidays on Ice, first published in 1997:

If I could believe in myself, why not give other improbabilities the benefit of the doubt? All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints.

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Speaking of books, the most refreshingly un-cliché round-up I’ve come across this season is

Katherine May

‘s Winter Reads: An Alternative Guide. The author of the book Wintering shares her rare collection of winter reads and where to find them.

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Bring on the holiday cheer! Our Most Embarrassing Stories — this is a gem from Abby, Amanda, and Glennon at We Can Do Hard Things. Listen when you need a joyful dose of irreverence. It’s just so good — a reminder that sharing our most cringe-worthy moments in the warmth of friendship is an antidote to shame.

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And finally, only slightly embarrassingly, I’ve created 397 (?!) Spotify playlists over the past decade. What else have I been doing? Here’s one to lean into this month. A gift to paid subscribers, with all my thanks for your support of The Guest House.

December. We got this. With love, Shawn.

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