Ask the world to reveal its quietude ... the true quiet by which birdsongs, trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms become what they are, and are nothing else. ~Wendell Berry

Creativity Prompt #23: The Secret Power of “Not Yet” and the Importance of Stillness | 30-Day Creativity Challenge

Henri Rousseau's Virgin Forest with Sunset (1910)

Friends, today’s creativity prompt comes from Billie Ouellette-Howitz, my youngest, who is (like me) both a writer and a trained yoga teacher. Of course, some of you have met and studied with Billie on retreats with me in 2022, in Minnesota, Illinois, or Ixtapa. I hope you enjoy this special guest post. For more like this, you may enjoy Billie’s new Substack, Dumpster Yoga.

And now, welcome, Billie!

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Hi everyone! It is such a joy to get to join in the April creativity challenge. For those of you who don’t know me–I am, as my mom just said, Jeannie’s youngest, as well as a writer, yoga teacher, and student of attention. 

And what I am thinking about today is how I’ve always found something unsettling about the fissure between seasons. I get restless on the cusp of each transition. I start bouncing my legs, or picking my cuticles. My energy rushing through what already is into what is coming. 

This year the interminably slow transition into spring in Minnesota has only magnified that feeling. I wrote today’s prompt in the spirit of that. In an effort to get my fingers into the heart of that feeling. To begin pulling on the threads of that knotted energy to allow some ease and peace to flow back into my body. 

Recently my two-year-old foster son has been learning about the power of words—and time. “Time for bath,” I tell him. “Bath soon,” he answers back. Soon. This magic word that means not yet. This word that means that now can last a little longer. 

To witness a child first master language is to witness how language itself organizes experience. Language changes our perception and alters the way we experience our lives. The power of language constantly shapes our reality, whether we know it or not. But when we become more aware of this force, we gain more agency in the process of that shaping.

As writers, this is especially important. How do we bring ourselves back to the present and resist the urge to veer off into the future? Wendell Berry offers a beautiful suggestion in his iconic poem, “The Peace of Wild Things” which begins:

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

This brings me back to the power of “not yet,” and the itchy restlessness of “not yet spring,” and today’s prompt. When we are faced with anticipation, with an impending transition, with a horizon of what comes next (which, spoiler alert: we always are), we often want to get through it, over it, on with it. But when we cave to this temptation, to our need for false certainty, we miss out on everything that not yet has to teach us. 

So the premise of today’s prompt is this: Be still. Be present. Pay attention. Because when we find stillness in the home of our bodies—even as the whole world screams for us to move, hustle, plan, change, transform—we make space for not yet, for now. 

And when we practice that over and over unexpected questions (and answers) can rise to the surface. 

I recommend you complete today’s prompt in three consecutive parts which will take about 15-20 minutes in total. 

Creativity Prompt #23: The Secret Power of “Not Yet” and the Importance of Stillness