Welcome to a love letter, a monthly publication from artist, writer and yoga teacher Colby Mackenzie featuring stories of my loving practices and support for yours. This year (Oct 2021 - Sept 2022), we’re practicing with The Artist’s Way. Thanks for being here.
Hello loves!
How are you doing, hmm? Welcome to the first full month of spring.
As you’re ready, take a deep breath in through the nose.
Hold at the very top of fullness.
When you sense the exhale, open the mouth and slowly let the breath all the way out.
Repeat as many times as you wish.
That is all you need do for now. If you’re low on energy, mark this email for a later date and take a break.
If you have the appetite, below is an overview of our next chapter of The Artist’s Way, the poem for our practice, and a short story as my artist offering this month.
The Artist’s Way Ch 7: Recovering Connection
Last month’s Chapter 6 was recovering a sense of abundance, and boy it was a whopper. Lots of money stories uncovered and some healed. A new sense of opportunity and drive. Commitment to counting. Embracing creative luxury. It was hard, but all good stuff.
Next up for April is Chapter 7: Recovering a Sense of Connection.
Julia summarizes: “We turn this [month] to the practice of right attitudes for creativity. The emphasis is on your receptive as well as active skills. The essays, exercises, and tasks aim at excavating areas of genuine creative interest as you connect with your personal dreams.”
The essays cover listening, perfectionism (my favorite!), risk, and jealousy. If you don’t have the workbook and are curious, here’s a sneak peak at some tasks:
Give yourself time out to listen to an album. Maybe doodle while you listen, shaping the sounds and emotions you hear. Notice how just 20 minutes can refresh you. Learn to take these mini artist dates to reduce stress and promote clarity.
Create one wonderful smell in your house — with soup, incense, candles, anything you love.
Wear your favorite item of clothing for no reason.
Create a collage of images that represent your past, present, future dreams. Things you love. Tear them out of magazines and paste them onto a sheet of newspaper or poster board in way that pleases you. Put it in a special place.
And a favorite quote from the ones lacing the margins:
Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark. — Agnes de Mille
Practice: Poetry Pause
Poetry Pause is what I call this mix of pranayama (breath work) and a poetry reading, a creative practice I started offering on November 3, 2020, the day of the election, to encourage ease, calm the nervous system, and share delight.
This month’s recording (above) appropriately features Mary Oliver’s “Spring” poem. I love the euphemism of the birds making love, “carrying life forward”, as a symbol for the end of winter. Enjoy!
Do you enjoy our Poetry Pause? What else are you practicing to nourish yourself these days?
Lovely Lately: A Short Story
A few weeks ago, I had a strange dream. I woke and started to record it in my morning pages. What resulted is the following short story - the first one I’ve ever written. It’s dark and mythical (do you recognize which one?!) and writing it was such a surprising delight.
If you read and enjoy the story, option to Venmo me an appreciation donation @Colby-Sheffer. A portion of your investments will go to Voices of Children, a foundation providing psychological support to Ukranian children affected by war. Thank you.
The White Piano by Colby Mackenzie
The sky above her was a washing machine of blacks and grays, deep angry blue and thunder purple. Cumulus clouds heavy with rain danced and lashed and whirled and then parted their skirts to unleash water that whipped, whipping water that pelted her hopeless face as it turned to the sky.
She couldn’t open her eyes all the way or the drops would hit them like daggers. There was only the squelch of the mud, the boiling sky, and the churning sea beside her. Lightning flashed close as she tilted her head all the way back now; she saw her death and her future in the storm clouds that danced without her and about her and would one day suck up her soul to join the rest.
Her prayer went unanswered again. She leveled her face with the round rock before her and bent her knees, looking up the hill. Her hands were bloody from pushing into cracks and her feet were stuck in a foot of mud but nevertheless. Nevertheless.
It was morning, and there was one thing to do for the next six hours. Some days it was a rock, a boulder. Some days it was a clock, sometimes the 90’s low rectangles with rounded edges and blinking red font. Once or twice it was a white piano like the one she saw in a video on Instagram, the white piano still standing in a home now made of rubble, a white piano now whistling perhaps its last tune for its owner 50 miles outside Kyiv.
There was never any time.
There was always too much time.
“Let’s go”, she said aloud to the bruised sky, like the woman in the video said.
She took a deep breath in and placed her hands on the clock, circular and old this time.
Breathe.
Dig in your heels.
Bend your knees.
Why am I still wearing this fucking suit.
It was ripped now at the knees, the jacket’s white buttons long gone. The flared bottoms were caked in scum and filth and dragged now, despite the precision hemming. It fit her ass like the cognac leather glove Matthew McConnaughey wears driving his shiny Lincoln sedan. It was the perfect black suit and this was the hill she would die on.
She hissed and grimaced, her eyes closed. She pushed.
The mud made a sucking sound as it released a few inches of the brown wood, as the antique numbers angled slightly more clockwise. The rain had made her fingers prune. She wedged her knee against her progress and leaned back.
Deep breath in.
The hill she was on was a small island just off an ambiguous shore, a grassy hill in the spring but a hill to die on in a winter storm. The speck of earth was propped up by jagged rocks that gleamed silver in moonlight.
A wave launched itself over the rocks and hit her, made her knee slide and now the clock rolled back down to its starting position, nearly crushing her. Strings of hair stuck to her face, stuck to her eyeballs like leeches, strayed tight across her throat like eels the sea spat out.
She was a slave to time and profit and was now being punished.
For six hours each day, she pushed the boulder or clock or fucking piano up the hill as far as she could. She got it all the way up there once or twice in the beginning, a strength fueled by fury. And for the subsequent six hours, the rock or clock or piano would slide its way back down the hill towards her, imperceptibly at first, slow enough for a congratulations the first time.
And then the backslide. The horror. The first time was horror. The second was disbelief. The third was hysteria, a laugh that became a cackle and then a scream.
That was four days ago.
During the six hours the rock or clock or piano made its way back down from hell towards her each day, she scavenged for and smashed open sea urchin bellies, plucked and sucked barnacles tucked in the cold rocks. There'd be seaweed too if she was lucky, that light brown kelp that looked like ribbons of fettuccine on steroids. She remembered making fettuccine from scratch once.
By the time the rock or clock or piano made its way to the bottom, the sun was setting sharply and she slept in its shadow, moaning and freezing beneath elastane before waking up to do it all over again.
Today was the first storm. It arrived shortly after she woke at dawn. The first clouds were too fat, too red – a scar bursting open at the horizon and gushing its power across the sky towards her. The red darkened into a maroon halfway across the sea, the color of dried blood inside an infected war wound. By the time the monstrous fists of vapor circled above her head they were royal purple - a trick, too beautiful to look away. Her awe distracted her from the wind that came quickly, the wind with that tell-tale smell and slight chill, and then she felt the rain. And she and the rock (clock, piano) were still at the bottom of the hill.
Motherfucker.
Her stomach growled, her left knee twitched.
It had to be done. Even just a little. But she had to try for the full six. She had to.
She stood in front of it. It was a rock, a smooth boulder this time. The heaviest of the three.
She stripped, throwing the nine hundred dollar Black Halo suit into the sea. She tore off the thin underwear and the useless camisole. Naked, she squatted on the rocks by the edge. Ate the sea snails she had saved, running her dirty thumbnail over each to remove the slime before popping it into her mouth. She squatted wide and bent her knees low, looking down at the perfectly waxed pubis that now itched, the small nub of her clit visible.
Her hands came together at her heart. Deep breath in. Full breath out. She drove all her weight down through her heels and slowly rose, extended her arms to the devilish sky above, and howled the wild, gnarled sound of a wolf tracked into a corner, hissed like the irritated cobra in a thin, covered basket.
She would need them all now.
Five pushups and a running start. Knees low to the ground. Chest tilted forward and the rock in contact with her right shoulder. Her wrists flexed. Glutes and thighs engaged.
May the power of all mothers be with me, she whispered to no one.
Gritted her teeth. Pushed. Pushed. Screamed. Pushed. The rock budged. She bared her teeth, that one incisor, pointed and dangerous. Pushed. Another inch. How many more inches? It didn’t matter. She just had to keep pushing for these six hours, and then could stop wherever she was. It didn’t matter where she was, it never did. The roll back down the hill still took the same six, the same six she collapsed into each afternoon.
Push. Budge. Push. Scream. Snarl. Glare. Wince. Cry. Continue. She’d maybe gone three inches in three hours. The water rushed off her smooth seal back, indifferent. Her feet were too deep in the mud. She had to begin again. Smarter this time.
Stumbling over jagged edges she collected as many loose rocks as there were - sharp, fat, flat, skinny - and piled them at the bottom where the clock now was. Backed up several feet and shook her arms and legs loose, the muscles like rubber. Another running start, another bruised shoulder. This time when she gained an inch, she toed a rock to the space she had just emptied, let the clock rest there against it. Again. Her voice hoarse from screaming. Another inch, another rock. The devil was inside her now, thrashing; her molars would become dust. No matter. Push. Another inch and then three hours later, a foot laid with rocks wedged into the mud. She reached for the one farthest from her, brought it to the front as her next aid.
To let go was not possible without starting over.
Push. Deliver us from evil. Push. For thine is the kingdom. Scream. The power. Hurl. The glory forever and ever. Crack. Amen.
She woke at the bottom. The clock lay a foot up the hill in a thousand pieces. Black ash smoldered in the middle of broken wood and glass, the smoke beaten by the rain. She looked down at her naked body covered in cinders. There was something on her that glowed too, like a fairy had struck her instead.
There was no blood, only a dull ache coursing throughout her body like her veins themselves were tired of the work. She groaned, rolled over to her left side and curled inward so her knees nearly touched her face. A small sob. There was nothing left now.
Yet she sensed something. Over her shoulder. She rolled onto her hands and knees, heaved, and raised her eyes towards the shore. There in front of her at the far edge of the island rocks stood a horse, silver and white and mottled gray, its withers shining in the damp. There was a spear on its forehead that looked brown and gold.
She stood and wobbled towards the animal, hand low and outstretched. The beast stamped and whinnied, jerked its head as she reached toward it. She smoothed the hairs on its neck, cooed softly. The eyes were lavender. She looked down its back toward the shore and now saw what appeared to be a bridge rising from the sea, rising at the edge of the island, rising in the circling waves, rising to meet the sand at the shore. It looked odd and bumpy, but like a bridge nonetheless. Nonetheless.
She led the beast over to the hill and walked up the hill to a height where she could mount her, sitting bare and cold on her back. Clutching the white mane, she let the animal lead them toward the rock edge, toward the first steps of the bridge. But as they got closer, the strange nature of the bridge revealed itself.
Bodies. Hundreds and hundreds of bodies the sea had swallowed and now regurgitated to the surface in a log pattern, bodies that dipped and squelched as the animal’s hooves pressed down, faces that disintegrated into mush, eyeballs that popped out from the pressure, each inching down again to be lost in the water once their purpose was served. She felt bile rising in the back of her throat and coughed it onto the animal’s bright back, disgusted. She wiped it off with her hand and flicked her insides at the water.
Just look straight ahead.
Halfway there.
A hoove crushed the skull of a child.
She threw up again, this time leaning over toward the right side to empty into the water itself, the water that was now black and impenetrable and bubbling with what looked like snakes.
What is this.
The animal reached the shore at last. To their right down at the end of the beach shone a lighthouse she never noticed before. Its beam swung round and round, circling the emptiness for survivors. They approached at a trot now. To be inside. Inside. Inside.
At the base of the lighthouse a stone cottage was attached. A pale light eked towards them from the two small windows. More weary than wary, she dismounted with no grace, hurried toward the door, and flung it open.
Inside was an old woman in a rocking chair by the live fire. The light bounced off the only other object in the room - a white piano.
“Welcome”, she said.
Welcome.
The end.
I wish you the space, time, and courage to express your own creativity in small ways and big ones. If you need as much help as I do, The Artist’s Way workbook is there whenever you’re ready.
If you’d like to jumpstart a creative habit, Suleika Jaouad of the Isolation Journals is starting a 100 day creative project today, April 1, and inviting her community to join. I am committing to drawing/painting one flower a day :).
Remember: creativity = nourishment = love.
Wishing you reprieves of hysterical laughter,
Colby
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