Embracing the Liminality of Samhain
My 300 Day Streak Takeaways on Feeling Stuck and (Un)Fixed Finish Lines
Happy Halloween, Revision Mode Readers!
It’s been a minute and I thank you for your patience since my last posts about The Business of Creativity. If you missed them, check it out— I take you through an async version of my free workshop here, and I’m planning more free workshops — soon! (Like, next month. Upgrade to paid for special promo offerings on my new release creative workshops, too!)
I absolutely love this time of year — the traditions, the rituals, the historic origins and the seasonal shift it marks from the harvest into the holiday season, and then the long, cold, winter months in Chicago.
Creatively, the shift from go-go-go summer energy to reflecting on the year we’ve shared together, and dreaming and planning for fun to come is big in my world. There’s a seasonal, natural transition energy at this time — the thinning of the veil between worlds, perhaps — that inspires me to get revising, rewriting, releasing what’s no longer needed (thank you, autumn leaves) to refocus and realize my shifting creative priorities.
365 Challenge: Painting pumpkins on my 300th Day of Creativity Everyday
My decision to start this 365 Creativity Everyday challenge on January 1 of this year was spontaneous. I didn’t really have a game plan other than to try and create something new every single day mostly just to see if I could do it. Obviously there are many things we do every day without fail and without fanfare to survive, but really committing to doing something that helps us thrive is hard, especially while in survival mode. I think that this commitment to thriving, in small ways every day, has been key to my surviving and managing the pro-social stress of the year, a stress that has been hard to hold energetically as a parent, teacher, and community organizer.
Practicing creativity daily, as a ritual, as a “to do” as a non-negotiable for the past 300 days has shown me that I am creative in ways I never realized before this year, and it also brought into focus my core philosophies and perspectives for creative fulfillment, and overcoming the struggles of balancing a working mom life with my (sometimes or often unpaid) creative life.
100 Days of Creativity Everyday | Playfulness, Purpose & Process, Cringe is Cool
200 Days of Creativity Everyday | How To Make More Time To Do Everything
And now, in the twilight of 2025, as I celebrate 300 consecutive days of Creativity Everyday, I’m realizing that this consistent practice has prepared me to make the most of this energetic moment as well.
HOW THE LIMINALITY OF SAMHAIN IS INSPIRING ME RIGHT NOW
Liminality is a theme I explore in all my writing. (Shout out to my favorite poet, feminist press founder, artist, activist, colleague, friend for over half my lifetime and brilliant creative writing mentor, Becca Klaver)
In my June Monthly, Airport Quesadillas: Authenticity, A.I., and the Art of Reinvention in Liminal Spaces, I reflect on how liminal spaces — when we’re caught in-between, waiting — can be so creatively invigorating because for many of us, it’s only when we’re unreachable, neither here nor there, that we can detach enough from our daily obligations to give our creativity the time it needs to play.
This time of year (according to the Morton Arboretum, this weekend is Chicago’s peak for fall foliage) features the brightest flaming colors on our trees before the leaves fade and fall. The days are colder, and darker. Spooky Season’s ghost stories and the folklore and sacred traditions around Samhain and All Saints Day / Dia de los Muertos remind us that this transitional time has been felt cross-culturally for centuries.
What a fun time to explore this idea of feeling stuck and contemplating (un)fixed finish lines!
WHAT GETS US STUCK CAN GET US UNSTUCK, TOO
So, I’ve been working on a longer post on The Art of Disagreement that I’d hoped to release for the October Monthly and my Q3 Master Class, exploring creative differences as a lens and framework, and then practical strategies for giving, taking, and implementing feedback and notes on your own work, and the works of others. (Spoiler: not happening this month, but if this intrigues you, upgrade to paid because this will be a free light read and premium deeper dive coming soon!)
So what got me stuck? Pro-social stress. Politics. Anxiety about the welfare of my friends, my family, my students, my neighbors. This fall has been really intense globally, nationally, and especially locally here in Chicago. And mentally, I’ve been focusing all my energy to show up strong for my students so our classes can be an escape and creative reprieve, and on the soccer sidelines for my kids for the same reasons. I didn’t have the bandwidth to devote the time and energy needed to my own creativity in a bigger way — so my writing took a backseat to everything else that felt more urgent. I just couldn’t get that piece across the finish line. I got stuck realizing that what I wanted to say was taking me deeper and deeper into something that required more time and thought (and research) to untangle.
Sometimes, certain projects inspire us and the moment of inspo passes, or the timing of it becomes less relevant, and it’s like — well what now? Other times, I find that we start writing something that’s a great idea but then as you go deeper into it, you realize this is a much bigger project than what you first envisioned and… sometimes you feel like following through anyway, and others, not so much.
And while I got stuck deep on that idea, I unwittingly chipped away getting unstuck — by thinking about it mostly, but also writing about it casually in texts, journaling, creating Instagram posts and reels about it, and holding myself accountable to doing the research and following through on what I wanted to explore and now I’m almost there. A little later than expected, but on my way.
What got me unstuck on this particular idea? The fierce urgency of now. I want to support and inspire those I know to hold faith— not just hope, real faith — that the socio-economic-political crisis we face right now is still something we can come together to face and overcome on a daily and eventual basis. As a professor, I have the privilege to hear a lot about what GenZ thinks about the world today, and what they think about the future. Their fears about climate change, political strife, a society divided amidst changing rules of engagement and how that impacts our daily lives mirror my own, and concerns shared by my friends across generations.
FINISH LINES ARE NOT FIXED
When you’re creating for yourself, trying to launch your passion projects, self-imposed deadlines can be critical to holding yourself accountable. When I’m paid to write, I make my deadlines. When I’m not— it’s a lot harder to hold myself to the same standards I hold myself to when I’m getting paid to do it. Inevitably, something always comes up, and rigid boundaries around time and priorities are not practical for me as a working mom, especially not during soccer season when I want to be there to support my family and contribute to the shared responsibilities of running the household.
It’s taken me a very long time to really wrap my head around what it means to hold myself to an unfixed finish line but I got clarity on it reflecting on this idea to celebrate my 300 Day Streak of Creativity Everyday (and documenting it).
The project that we want to write, create, launch may not be ready for us to do so, we may not be ready to greet it, meet what it requires to get it out into the world— and if we hold ourselves to a fixed finish line, we miss the opportunity to discover what it might become at a time when our creativity is aligned with delivering it.
In simpler terms, the right project at the wrong time is the wrong project to prioritize right now. While I try to avoid right/wrong, I find this binary helpful in this instance to help us see how we can work with our creative blocks to move from feeling stuck to unstuck and back in the creative flow. To do this, we have to recognize a few things:
Deadlines can be both helpful and stifling. When you’re stuck on a deadline, ask yourself: is this deadline flexible? If the deadline isn’t flexible — is the actual creative subject matter? If you have to produce a 1,000 words, and you want it to be one thing but something “easier” is flowing right now, why can’t you pivot?
Finish lines can be both fixed and unfixed. When you have a specific finish line— a specific outcome, product-goal in mind — what happens when you challenge yourself to complete it in smaller, more manageable pieces? Instead of finishing the act, why not just finish the sequence? This one is especially salient for my kindred spirits in unreasonable expectations for our productivity. When you set smaller, incremental goals that are definitely easier to accomplish in a less time, with less bandwidth, you can start to check off consistency in completing and meeting the mini-goals. Stacking those mini-goals feels like progress. Making progress motivates us to keep going. When we keep going, we get the damn thing done. Baby steps. I’m doing the work!
When we release our rigidity around self-discipline, we liberate ourselves to find new and surprising ways of being creative. Another theme I’m super into, obviously.
LIBERATION IN LIMINALITY
Yes, the freedom of existing without distraction or obligation in liminal space/time is luxurious, delicious, and for me, something I crave. The other thing that liminal space/time does, though, is let you be who you want to be without limitation.
Discipline with deadlines and finish lines is the road everyone travels because it’s safer, easier, known, and usually leads to recognition for the accomplishment, all of which can feel incredibly rewarding (and externally validating, and motivating).
Liminal space is usually quieter. The void. The unknown. Riskier. Harder. May never lead to recognition. May never lead to the accomplishment of the thing you set out to do. May lead you to something different. All of which can feel … scary.
This Samhain, I invite you to go into your shadows, and embrace the liminality of the season and see what you find. Face the darkness, and light it up with your discoveries. Play. Lower your expectations for the final product. Maybe be surprised by the higher performance outcomes. Align purpose with process, not product. It’s okay if it’s cringe. 200 Days later, I still think cringe is cool. When you’re in this in-between, there’s no expectation for who you’ll be, what you’ll create, or how it’ll be received on the other side, so all you have to do is go into it discovering and exploring your where-when-and maybe realize (all over again) your why.
And more on The Art of Disagreement and using our creativity to get through the moment coming soon in November.
CURATED CREATIVITY |
ENDORSING THINGS I LOVE, UNPAID, JUST STRAIGHT FROM THE HEART
Meanwhile, if you want some recommendations for exploring your shadow side, going deeper into shadow work, I have made some profound creative breakthroughs and personal healing shifts in my life that have made me a better mother, wife, friend, family member, teacher, and writer by working with Maria Macnab.
Check out my friend Maria Macnab’s Coaching & Reiki Healing
And if you’re eager to dive into your liminal space for some personal and/or professional self discovery, check out these two books (I’m loving!) and reading and working through right now by two of my friends. The (FREE!) companion guide journals for each are so thoughtful and bite-sized enough that you’ll actually find time to do it. Bonus: you’ll be supporting indie artists and if you get Colleen’s book today, 10% of proceeds are going to support the Cancer Center where she received treatment, in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness month.
Colleen Ochab’s Fight For Your Fairytale: A Guided Quest to Total Transformation
Alexia Melocchi’s The Heart of Show Business: Your Road Map To Hollywood and free companion guide here on her author website
Thanks for reading, and thanks for sharing.
With creative fire, Kat
How the Polish Black Madonna Became Haitian Vodou Spirit Erzulie Dantor
Last updated on: July 26, 2018 at 1:25 pm by Andrew Chesnut
By Dr. Kate Kingsbury† and Debra Van Neste*
Since time immemorial religions have been born from the random rencounters of disparate doxa that have syncretically intertwined to create new modes of believing, belonging and being in our world. Vodou is one such religion, whose roots are an entangled skein of myriad origins. Primarily the faith’s principal provenance may be traced to Africa, yet Vodou has also been critically contoured by Catholicism. Only once we understand how cocktails of convictions create new religions, can we comprehend how the Black Madonna became a Vodou Spirit.
A Racist Myth: the Satanic Savage
Catholicism was imposed upon the New World by the French colonists and Iberian conquistadors. European missionaries proselytised with the paternalistic promise to ‘civilise the savages’ and deliver them from the evils of their own indigenous beliefs, which according to Darwinian tropes in time at that place, held back their evolution. Furthermore, according to the racist ideology prevalent in that zeitgeist, Christians asserted that local spiritual beliefs had at their fulcrum diabolical deities and satanic forces that would only lead to iniquity and debauchery. They must be eradicated.
Notwithstanding this, conversion to Christianity did not inhere locals merely ‘uploading’ Christian beliefs and rituals as a carbon-copy. Christianity was reinterpreted by local populaces, such as African slaves and other indigenous peoples, along the lines of their own pre-existing religious traditions.
Vodou Visions : a New Faith in a New World
In the 18th century slaves from Africa were forcibly brought to Haiti by the colonial powers to work on the plantations thereby providing dirt-cheap labour for their white masters. Many slaves were brought from Dahomey (Benin), Ghana, Senegal, the Gambia, Nigeria, Angola and the Congo. Although stripped of their family, roots and homeland, these slaves retained the complex cornucopia of beliefs and rituals that had at its fulcrum indigenous spirits -often related to nature and the elements- ancestor worship and possession by spirits.
Those from Dahomey practised Vodun, which although the grandparent of Vodou, is not exactly the same. Albeit, it is incontrovertibly evident that Haitian Vodou, much like its older parent, consists of a polytheistic pantheon of spirits and divine elements that reign over the cosmos.
Upon arriving in the colony these slaves formed a new multicultural community, even conjoining with the few Taino Amerindians that remained after the decimation by Christopher Columbus’ men. And the congeries of spiritual ideas coalesced to form Haitian Vodou. This faith and its rituals indubitably offered the captives respite and succor as they sought solace and agency, invoking spirits, known as Lwa, to cope with the egregious conditions imposed upon them by their white masters and violent atrocities to which the colonisers subjected them to on a daily basis.
The French, afraid of these seemingly ‘savage’ beliefs and ‘wild’ rituals forced the slaves to convert to Christianity. This concatenation of events led to a cultural cooking pot where different religious registers syncretically synthesised and symphonised. Due to the imposition by the French of Catholicism, the religious arras that is Vodou was added to with Christian colours that entangled within the webs of other interwoven threads came to take on new meanings and impel neoteric modes of worship.
Thank you for this beautiful piece. I love the idea of liminal space, how it may never bring external recognition, yet can lead to something far more meaningful. There’s a freedom in allowing ourselves to explore the uncertainty, to linger in the void because that’s often where the real magic unfolds.