Month: July 2022

shift, nearer

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Yes, I went a little bit silent. Despite the sweet encouragements of the wordpress world (‘you’re on a [insert number here] day streak!’ I got absorbed into another direction.

I have been making a rhythm path into my creativity, but also, I notice now, my living.

As my creative practice is continually also an investigation into the nature of existence, the living and the art are closely intertwined. Deep shifts have been going on in my own deep life, old stories have been moving to take up new positions, new stories may or may not be being born, but they will only be able to be born if space is made for them.

Such a work is one of great tenderness and almost perpetual bewilderment, perseverance yes, and perhaps this is why this has been such a focus.

But now the shift has completed, or is completing, and then a new space is opening up. As usual the space comes with a sense of dizzying exposure alongside the delight. What will fill this space, what discoveries will get made, who will arrive to commune with it, how to protect it? It is a space for tiny flutterings and glimmerings yet as with all tender spaces most likely the giants of the land will be waiting to sneak in forbiddingly.

So I go gently and write and try to inhabit peace and trust. And to soak up and reveal in the creativity of a moment of blossoming freedom that comes rarely in life and is a gift of great power and beauty.

goodbye

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I reached the top of the mountain
all of a sudden, unknowingly,
of us
Suddenly, there was no more climb
beneath me
you were far away
and lost forever
and my diligent everlasting love
and my efforts,
had not saved you.

So I discovered
(or had they; perhaps
I will never know)

But they had saved me
or, it is truer to say
they made me; they made
my bones, they made
my freedom
they made my love
stretch further than
it ever had before,
they made my fire more
ferocious, they made my
passion reach beyond
the bounds of
everyday imagination,

they made the rock,
they made the heights,
they made the view
they made the ‘we’ of friendships
strengthen to a wondrousness
they made a miracle
oh, and you will miss it,
that is sad, but someone
else will live that substance
with me
and, with me, will
revel in its glory.

Thank you.

persevering: happenstance

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One thing it is so easy to forget in persevering is the existence of happenstance.

Because it takes consistent diligent effort, it is so easy to slip into the mindset that it is only one’s consistent diligent effort that exists.

A kind of siege mentality develops from such a state, making perseverance a kind of ironman-like endurance race, a continual suffering, a loneliness.

Indeed I have been making consistent diligent efforts to develop a studio rhythm such that without a ‘studio outside’ I can still access the studio inside.

But one of the most beautiful aspects of perseverance is that somethings, perhaps often, it meets with the happenstances that no personal efforts can conjure.

Like today, when the very first day of my summer rest, I find that the roadworks outside my home, the metal-on-rock cacophony of which has oppressed every week day for months from 7am in the morning, and from which I have been endlessly escaping to work at the local (also hectic) café, have been completed, dismantled and entirely disappeared. And my home, rather than being uninhabitable, has become a sanctuary.

the studio inside, threshold

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Persevering with the studio rhythm as a path to the studio inside is starting to pay off I notice.

Something that I did in the real studio rhythm was to record my morning piano playing, and then later to play it to myself. I am not sure what made this idea occur to me, because never before have I listened to my own playing, still with mistakes, hesitations and an overly long pause needed to turn the pages, as a source of joy. It took long years as an adult to recapture any of the delight of playing as a child, so painful was the décalage between my old competence and new ineptitude. And to actually record and listen back to myself was excruciating.

Yet here I am, and there is something in my own music. It’s mysterious to me.

So yesterday for the first time I played my music back to myself in the more ordinary setting of the apartment. I was a bit disconsolate and needed something to soothe the mean fears that had crept in to try to nibble on a new joy. And this playing filled the apartment with fully-human-with-all-her-errors-being. There is something in myself that is trying to tell something, to offer something to myself. What is it? Mystery.

But this, I realise, is part of the perseverance of the studio inside. And the playing of this yesterday made me feel today like I am on a threshold, and that soon I will be able to more fully live my creativity into the summer, even without the much longed for material studio. The elements are nearly all in place.

(I will know I am there when I am able to paint.)

feeding perseverance

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Today there was a certain new joy in persevering with the rhythm that will sustain the studio inside.

Alongside other chores, yesterday I had two calls with old friends, and although in a way both of them were need and I was helping (listening, which I am not always good at), the quality of the (re)connection – (‘re’, because we have been so little in contact in the ferocious wildness of the last two years) was very deep. They’ve both known me a long time, and although there is a certain element of them knowing a me that I no longer am, there is also a knowing of a me that I deeply am and will always carry with me, that newer friends will never truly know.

Then I cycled to the seaside on my bike, taking with the picnic food that my mother always makes for my family’s seaside trips, simplicity itself yet with the soul of a thousand small memories.

It is not totally the case that I have cleverly made a joy happen; it’s partly the sheer fact that after persevering with so many chores and so much work, some of them are now done. There is a loosening into the necessary tasks of the day. I am at liberty to untangle thing more, to create more freedom. I note to myself the importance of not accidentally accumulating more.

Nonetheless, I am aware of a kind of deeper nourishment. My soul is resting. My perseverance can come from a deeper place, from the deep heart rather than from a certain kind of drier (yet for a time necessary) intention.

In the middle of my life I found myself in a beautiful garden. I’ve longed for one, and although I expected it to be in a more conventional house and of a more private nature, the one I have tumbled into is a continuing wonder; a collective small garden converted from a tiny park, in the middle of the city, with small allotment boxes with the growings of strangers who are becoming known, and a communal, collectively tended vegetable garden from which I can at will pick spinach, herbs, beans, potatoes.

I feed my perseverance by putting myself in the path of beauty and trying not to neglect the wondrousness of existence, by a collaboration.