A Nook of Your Own

In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.


-VIRGINIA WOOLF

In October 1928, the British novelist and literary critic Virginia Woolf gave two lectures on women and fiction at Cambridge University in England. In her talks she publicly voiced for the first time what women had quietly shared among themselves for centuries: in order for women to create, they needed privacy, peace, and personal incomes. The following year these lectures were published as A Room if One's Own, which was Woolf's recommendation if women were to honor and hone their creativity and not become "crazed with the torture" of silence.

Tillie Olsen has exquisitely explored the creative voice when it is muffled, muzzled, and mute-"the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot" -in her book Silences. Olsen her¬self was silenced for twenty years while she raised and supported four children through menial jobs that left her no energy to write; she was nearly fifty when she published her acclaimed first novel, Tell Me a Riddle.

Many of us today experience creative silence. Not the hush of the heart necessary to bring forth the unexpressed from Spirit, but the creative silence brought about by circumstances we feel are beyond our control: lack of time, and! or lack of space or a place to create. Perhaps we also suffer from a lack of clarity, a failure to realize how necessary it is to nurture our sacred creativity daily.

To begin with, many of us, unless we live alone, don't have a room entirely our own. But that does not mean we cannot carve out a small psychic space-even a nook-to call ours alone. I have a friend who created a personal space in the corner of a city apartment with a floral folding screen from the 1930s that she found at a flea market. Behind it she angled a small desk and a chair near a sunny window for a restorative retreat.

No room for a screen, a desk, and a chair? Then start with a bookcase all your own. The important thing is that the bookcase be yours: a psychic space that offers passionate reminders to attend to your private, artistic impulses, a place to encourage you to reclaim your creativity.