how it must be held

notes on creating from density

This is the first in a new series of weekly reflections — a space where I explore writing, memory, and creation as practice. I’ll be sending these out on Saturday or Sunday mornings; these pieces feel best held on slower days, in the threshold between weeks.

Weekly mutual aid moment:

I’m raising funds to help a former coding student in Gaza purchase a laptop so he can resume work and earn income online. After losing his home, months of displacement, and now living in a partially destroyed warehouse, what he’s asking for isn’t charity — it’s a way back to self-reliance and dignity. This fundraiser needs under $1,000 to meet its goal. Donate here.

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how it must be held: notes on creating from density

Winter is not just cold – it is dense.

Here in DC, a snow and sleet storm followed by below-freezing temperatures hardened the world around me. The unyielding ice has restricted mobility, forcing a slower, more deliberate way of moving.

Going outside now means walking through narrow tracks carved into what’s being called snowcrete — frozen piles of dirty white hardened into something between snow and concrete. A body bundled under layers, each step constrained. The density of the environment demands attention before action.

This week, I’ve started my journaling sessions by writing the question: what will you have me know? at the top of a blank page, setting a timer for fifteen minutes, and letting my hand move. It has become a ritual of listening before speaking, receiving before shaping. By starting with a question, I get to know the weight of my thoughts before letting them unfold.

Looking back at my drafts, especially work emerging from my time in Palestine, I realize I don’t think in straight lines. I think in constellations — stories held together by resonance rather than chronology, by texture and juxtaposition rather than sequence. Naming this has felt like a creative milestone: understanding my own patterns of meaning-making.

Beit Lahiya, Gaza, Palestine. March 2023. Photo by me.

I’ve also begun a weekly pottery class in a friend’s home studio — my first time working with clay. In our first session, before receiving any instruction, our teacher Sydney passed around a thick slab of mud and said, “Get to know what seven pounds of clay feels like.”

Step one: Acknowledge the weight, the density. The material before it becomes anything else.

Clay, like thought, teaches you how it must be held.