Dear Lexi, 

what is your work?

Show up on time
Park the car 
Parent
Prepare food
Hold space 
Supervise 
Keep safe
Diaper changes 
Supply orders 
Sanitize hands 
Normalize tears 
Nourish 
Mediate 
Vacuum 
Clean the trash can

Dear Alex, 

what is your work? 

I am an artist, painter, sculptor, performance, teacher, athlete, exhibitionist, intern, boss, mentor, reference, applicant, hustler, life model, student, organizer, leader, co-founder, home renovator, entrepreneur, comedian, and parasite.

Dear Maggie, 

what is your work? 

I teach
I mother
I cook
I clean
I email
I organize
I plan
I plan 
I plan, again. 

To those who work and labor, 

what is a tender, healthy, organic way to strive for excellence? what is compassionate excellence? how might my open hearted nature be related to compassionate excellence? is there a way to work really hard without damaging myself and others? is there a way to work in harmony with the flow of the earth? what is a feminist and non colonial way of working? how do I not only love my work but make it in a loving way?


These are the questions that arose in the process of creating a ceremony with/for Kaitlin Prest, an audio artist and director, to honor her creative pain. Kaitlin came to me in a season of stillness after years of grind, production and output. She came to me wounded and full of questions about how she might move forward as an artist in a manner that felt responsible to our world, those she worked with and her own heart. She came to me with a passage from the revered Kahlil Gibran. Gibran speaking of work says: 


     “You work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth.”


I believe this to be true and necessary and yet so often our work, however it manifests, feels out of pace with the soul of anything. The question of what we make/what we do/ how we work is a large one. 


These days my labor includes lifting babies, washing bottles, and changing diapers. The majority of my labor includes practicing patience, cultivating presence and expressing love. My labor exists in the small space between me and my babies and on good days I do think it has some reverberations with the collective soul of our humanity and on hard days it feels like drudgery. My work right now is quiet and illegible to many, sometimes even to myself. It is inner work and relational work and it is work that will not end up on my CV. 


Kaitlin generously offered to share documentation from her ceremony as I started sharing the Ritual Map: Honoring the Creative Wound. As I looked through the photos, videos and notes from our conversation I was called to another line in Gibran’s 

writing. 


     “Work is love made visible.”


Even on the harder days I do know, my cleaning high chairs and sticky stomachs is my love made visible. When I was teaching, everything from sitting beside a child to spending hours on the MTA to get to a school was my love made visible. When I make art I am expressing love even if I am making something filled with pain and confusion. All the labors we engage in, the big, the small, the “menial” and the “profound,” are an expression of our engagement with life and so perhaps are always some way of making our love visible, if we are open to that, if we allow our full selves to do the work and recognize the work within the context of our shared existence. 


The Ritual Map to Honor Creative Wound is a ceremony to help us attend to the part of us that dreams, makes and shares. But addressing wounds that arise as we work, no matter the field, is an important way to nurture the worker in us, the maker, the doer, the person that shows up in their life day after day and tends to what needs tending. 


May you honor what you do, may you honor how you do it, and may your work help you  “keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth.”

image of Kaitlin Prest's Creative Wound Altar 

Dear Jennie, 

what is your work? 

My paid work, includes hours upon hours of creating processes that aim to visibilize a simultaneously abstract and completely literal intention that hopefully brings us closer to justice & healing… checking in on friends & their hearts… taking care of my body and heart which hangs on by a thread and is sturdy as fuck…

Dear Meredith, 

what is your work? 

Mama bear. Pastor. Life Coach. Lover of grace and growth. 

Dear Cholee, 

Labor is a line that extends before me and behind me like a cord, wrapping around moments in time.  It connects what is to what has been and what will come.  We work, searching for alignment.  A glimpse of authentic movement within constriction but most often a burial in the mundane.  Are we worthy without work?  And when can we rest?  Without guilt, without shame, without burden.  Make space for dreaming a way up and out of this bondage.  Labor is bound up in necessity.  Birthing is a chore even if we labor in love. If we pause to consider labor’s chains a tiny portal may open, connecting past to present to future, bonding ancestor to ancestor, an invitation into spaciousness to offer ourselves to a work that is worthy of us.   

Love, 

Cholee