The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life
63 pages • 2-hour read
Suleika JaouadThe Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life
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Themes
The Cathartic and Transformative Quality of Creativity
The Book of Alchemy is part-memoir, part-guided journal, one geared towards helping the reader build a daily creative practice. In advocating for the “alchemy” of creativity, Jaouad and her contributors repeatedly argue that creativity can be not only a cathartic process, but a transformative one
Catharsis is the process of purging thoughts and feelings by channeling them outwards through expression, and the multiple stories and prompts nestled within the book highlight this aspect of creativity. Jaouad’s experiences reflect the importance of catharsis when she describes how journaling takes on increased value when she begins to engage with it during a stressful time. As she journals during her treatment for leukemia, the act becomes a way for her to process what is happening in her life through creative expression. As Jaouad claims, “Journaling as a process is utterly alchemizing, with practical applications in every area of one’s life and work […] Day by day, page by page, you uncover the answers that are already inside of you, and you begin to transform” (4).
Similarly, for many of the contributors in the book, the very act of sharing their past stories already functions as catharsis, even when it is not explicitly called out in the piece; for others, the cathartic quality is highlighted more explicitly, like Puloma Ghosh’s claim that she exorcizes the things that haunt her through her writing. The cathartic nature of creativity is thus repeatedly established throughout the book.
Jaouad and the contributors also go on to examine how creativity can be transformative as well. Jaouad shares her own experiences with this process twice over: Her first stint of creativity during a challenging time produced writing that led to a column, and a second stint led to watercolor paintings that eventually formed the basis of a larger exhibit. In both cases, the creativity doesn’t stop at catharsis, it transforms into something beyond the base experience of tragedy and survival, and becomes something beautiful and meaningful that doesn’t just help the individual move through the experience, but also touches a myriad of other lives.
This is the core idea that Jaouad repeatedly asserts: While it is a widely-accepted notion that creativity can be cathartic for the person, it offers an even higher hope to think of it also as transmutative. In the latter process, it is then able to offer not just solace but also reward when one welcomes in creative intuition and allows oneself to be comfortable with the unknowns of life.
Finding Resilience Through Recollection and Reflection
While The Book of Alchemy offers prompts and suggestions to the reader to help them engage in a creative practice, it also suggests that journaling can aid in developing resilience. Recollection and reflection serve as the tools to arrive at this place of strength.
There are different chapters in the book that entirely focus on aspects of this theme, such as fear or memory. In the chapter focused on memory, Jaouad delves unto the nature of this phenomenon and why it is important in a journey of creativity and self-awareness. As she describes the journals she kept in childhood, and other contributors share their relationships with different aspects of memory, it becomes clear that memory is personal history. Its telling and retelling shapes one’s sense of self, and so recollection is a powerful tool. Both what one remembers and what one tries to forget hold power, just as the chapter on fear illustrates, as Jaouad notes how confronting a fear, rather than attempting to escape it, is what actually deflates it. Thus, the power of recollection is made clear multiple times over.
An equally powerful practice is that of reflection. Even the pieces that do not explicitly call out the power of reflection still display its impact, as the insights that the different contributors offer in their essays are all arrived at through some manner of reflection. Recollection, followed by reflection, is presented as an especially powerful combination. The experiences Jaouad recollects in the chapter on fear are an example. Her phobia of mice is a real and intense one, and she is only able to dismantle it by bringing recollection and reflection together. By tracing the history of this fear as she reflects on its context and nature, she arrives at the realization that she had come to view mice as the harbingers of doom because of their association with her diagnosis. Once she sees this, it becomes less difficult to begin working through the fear.
This dual practice of recollection and reflection are characteristic of how Jaouad walks through life. Through journaling, storytelling, painting, and more, she is constantly practicing resilience itself. Another contributor has a similar experience, realizing that her experience of dealing with rheumatoid arthritis has left her generally resilient enough to be able to face an entirely different kind of tragedy later in life. Stories like these exhibit how one of the ways to arrive at resilience is through the dual practice of recollection and reflection.
The Power of Community in Challenging Times
While the book is often focused on helping an individual along their personal journey of growth and transformation, an equally important element in the process is the presence of community. While not as loudly and evidently discussed as the other ideas in the book, it is an equally important one that illuminates the power of community in challenging times.
Community and love are celebrated as essential components of support in various parts of the book, with love taking many forms: As Jaouad writes, “what I want to speak to transcends the happily-ever-after fairy-tale notions of romantic love. What I want to invoke is the radical power of seeing, understanding, and showing up for another human” (118). The multifaceted nature of love is reiterated by how, despite acknowledging her loving husband, Jon Batiste, Jaouad chooses to share a story of friendship. Jaouad describes her intense friendship with Anjali, a fellow cancer patient she meets while also undergoing treatment, and although Anjali later passes away, Jaouad nevertheless asserts that this relationship was one of the most meaningful of her life. That Jaouad chooses to highlight an experience of community and connection during a challenging time underscores its importance. The power of this experience resonates across other pieces as well, whether it is in the commiserative kinship of a hospital waiting room, a loving reminder from a friend in a period of “stuckness,” or the larger sense of connectedness one feels through the land itself to generations past and future. The idea of community looms large through it all.
The Book of Alchemy itself grew out of an existing project that Jaouad had: The “Isolation Journals,” a community creative practice set in motion through an newsletter that she created during the pandemic. Jaouad had already experienced the lows of isolation and quarantine herself, though in a different context as a person undergoing cancer treatment. Thus, not only was she familiar with the pain of loneliness, she was also armed with a tool to combat the uncertainty that had beset the world: Connection through creativity. While Jaouad explores creativity as personally alchemical, she also understands the undeniable power of community during crisis.
Thus, the “Isolation Journals” were born, and from it, this vast collection of essays and prompts was compiled with the help of a large community. In this manner, while the content within The Book of Alchemy helps the reader explore creativity and build resilience through the process, the context around its creation underlines the power of community in challenging times.
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