thoughts

self again

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Somehow here the self exists. What is it about writing to total strangers that allows her to skip about a bit, joyfully?

How did I find myself hemmed in with responsibilities that crush what I find so very valuable and precious?

The responsibilities are precious too.

Why am I particularly unable to feel my deepest feelings unless I have acres of time and space, and beauty? Other people seem to dwell in their feelings all the time.

The particular excavation it takes me to unearth a truly honest felt-response despite the glare of inconvenience, disapproval and doubt is so arduous.

I’ve got summer panic; the sensation that before I have had a chance to find her again I will find myself boxed up and transported to Other Things. That we will endure another forced separation. That I will spend my life in the journey between returning to retrieve her and the rushing back to fulfil my commitments. That I will be forever swimming down to the depths to discover the deep secrets only to find, on glimpsing a treasure, that it’s time to be back at the surface. That the treasures of the depths will continually elude us, because of the clamour in which our lives so continuously take place.

reticence

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I went to the watercolour museum and, at the last minute, forgot my phone.

Hmm. Do I go back, arrive late?

Hmm. Will anyone miss me? Is it callous to disappear if someone might be worried?

On the tram I ask a stranger to borrow their device and smugly reproduce from memory the mobile number of my mother. Please can you text x and y so that they don’t worry.

(Later I heard that she’d glanced at the strange number and dismissed the message as a scam. <Delete>)

I was unexpectedly free.

We all know this. We’ve read the articles in newspapers, the lack of phone now noteworthy enough to represent paid-for content.

But it’s real, the freedom.

I caught a bus and was delivered both to the seaside, and to an earlier self, the one, perhaps, that traveled around Europe on a career break just in time to have witnessed those places before smart-phones, selfies and repeat-posing. In time to experience community with strangers in a way that would never exist again.

Well, that still did not exist.

Or to a deeper self, a more mysterious self, the self of summers and depth-of-winters and sweetness and the self that knows innocent things and yet has the wisdom of ancient and commonplace experience.

It was as if all my responsibilities had been left behind, both the real ones but also the symbolic ones in that device, and then the reticent self emerged and coalesced for a little while, and I didn’t dare think too much about it in case I lost her too suddenly.

We saw the exhibition. We ate lunch in the sun. We swam. We took photos of textures and time.

Then the end was coming and of course as I approached home, dozy with the sun and hum of a phone-less journey, she slipped away.

And I am left to ponder if there is any real-life-compatible way to appeal to her.

reality

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Yesterday I collided with two deep forms of reality (amongst the swooshings of everything around me). Firstly, I felt lost. Writing this down in the middle of the day made me somewhat comically feel immediately found. Secondly I wanted to rest, but it was not the moment to rest. This did not have quite the same impact but it softened the fretfulness that I was experiencing between my longing to collapse and not being able to.

Earlier this summer I found myself staring at two stark truths; unavoidable and uncontrollable they were. Two things I long for but cannot simply procure.

There is something about deep reality (I make a distinction between that and the confusions of everyday life, a kind of reality of their own, but often too entangled with delusions to easily pick out the truth from the fictions) which is mysteriously comforting, even when unwelcome. It is freeing in a certain kind of sense because it will not suffer manipulation and is immune to control-strategies.

I am not sure exactly what I am doing with this insight, but in a way I somehow stay close to it, and it is strengthening me for the demands of the moment.

storm

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Perhaps it was inevitable after the summit – a storm has caught me in the ambiguity between descent and ascent.

Yesterday multiple things went wrong. Mercifully they were not so serious but they included news of two hospital trips for family members, one left on crutches, blood tests awry, a rejection, a full connectivity breakdown over the areas where my studio is, mobile phone reception repeatedly breaking, delays thus with all my tasks and projects, dark menacing clouds all day, a colleague being taken out by a 24hour virus just when his presence might have been reassuring and calls of need and distress from dear friends.

This is the kind of thing I do expect after a feat of daring, but it was very tiring and today I am depleted.

It’s extremely hard to work also. It’s almost impossible to get into my creative project – literally at the moment the door is blocked and the piano is in use by someone else.

A few encouragements managed to sail past the murky dissuasion of the glooming clouds: encouragements from clients, from a community group, success of a friend.

I keep being caught between resting and regrouping. I long to collapse into a cosy-movie-watching oblivion but the undone chores loom over me, and deadlines. I can still feel the intensity of my bravery in my body, as if fizzing with power, and this makes it difficult to truly relax.

Keep walking calmly, I tell myself. To some extent this is working.

descent, ascending

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It’s a strange moment.

Part of me is in the descent from the double summit. The weariness, the picking my way down intricate paths, gravity, triumph reverberating in my body, a gathering of power. Also, an accumulation of neglected tasks.

Part of me is in new terrain already. I have the keys to a new piano. I have a new project profile. I have a beginning to make. Wonder.

I’m existing in the middle of these two realities and it’s dizzying.

Somehow I am in need of a stillness in which these two things coalesce in a new order and how me the way forward.

This is why I am writing.

It’s very hard to enter into a stillness in a summit descent or a beginning. Both energies are the antithesis of stillness. In descent, there is the hurry to get down, to find a place of rest, of safety from exposure and vulnerability. In ascent, there is the the need to start to accumulate rhythm, so that a new path can be forged by momentum and commitment.

Perhaps I will not get all the way down? Perhaps I will only get as far as a plateau where a new ascent will take hold?

This is not a comforting thought. I feel a longing for rest.

It is a fact that rest is not entirely available in the present circumstances. Aside from the descent and ascent of creative work, there are endless chores and tasks requiring immediate attention, already showing signs of the neglect they have suffered.

I don’t yet have a clear picture.

Until I do I am picking my way along with care…