Month: July 2022

the studio inside, reflections

~ extraplorer ~ 1 Comment

In the morning I wrote about the studio inside and afterwards I went to play the piano downstairs (in my neighbour’s empty apartment) and I could feel it, a cavernous beautiful space, brimming with beauty and wholeness and a kind of truth.

I will live my summer from this feeling, I vowed to myself.

Then I went to help a friend move house, caught up on work matters neglected while I was busy and ill, arranged things, visited the still-packing friend, keeping her company while I dealt with personal emails, sent birthday cards to people (late) and wrote thank you notes and thinking of yous to friends in turbulence.

It is very much easier to respect the reality of the studio outside compared to the studio inside, I notice. I become invisible to myself and then my reality slides in a direction that is at odds with my true feelings.

Yet I feel an insistence that something is alive and important that I must tend.

It requires gentleness and care. Faced with looming to-do lists, it goes to ground and takes me time to coax it back into the open. I would strengthen my resolve but the very attempt at self-mastery likewise deters this tenderness from appearing.

I need to allow for the reorientation of my being.

the studio inside

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The week long residency in the heavenly studio came to an end. I cleaned, tidied and locked up.

I went to the Watercolour Museum on a pilgrimage and I was too tired to relish it (although I had enough energy to be annoyed by patriarchal posturing and no women’s voices.)

I came home wondering:

What next?

My weekend has been full of sweet social moments, a hiatus of grace.

But something in me is alive. How do I make space to create, what should be the rhythm, what happens in the hush. I have business work to do, but a distaste for harshness and discipline, which in my studio week, I escaped.

At the end of the week I was so tired I felt like perhaps the one week’s output had been enough for a whole summer.

But it hadn’t.

There is something in me and its precious and needs to be tended.

Yes, there are canyons of chores awaiting my attention, but there is something more… an insistence.

And a thought occurs to me:

Maybe the time in the studio was renovating

the studio inside?