treasure

dawn

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The dynamics of artistic retreat, resurgence and renewal mystify me.

I went on the artistic adventure, now over a year ago. I had a breakthrough.

The something happened and it was as if the breakthrough was entirely crushed. Buried underneath a weight of pain (someone else’s, which became mine) and some kind of gasping defeat.

And now a year has gone past.

I had a studio for five months earlier this year but the work was wintery and although luminous, also arduous.

Now I’ve been in a summer studio for a month and for most of it I’ve been in a long wrestling with existence.

And then suddenly there was a loosening and something is emerging, returning.

And I find myself here with you.

progress again

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One of the deepest joys of writing is to put into language tiny aspects of experience which rarely make it into words. It’s like this with my progress in these summer days. There is such quicksilver uncertainty if something is being made, what exactly?, anything?, and then suddenly there is a recognition, oh yes, there. There is something. It’s the flicker of an inner truth that a perspective has enlarged, that something hitherto hidden has revealed itself, that meaning has, even if almost imperceptibly deepened and strengthened, and most of all, its heralded by the unmistakeable presence of delight, an ancient barometer that is very rarely fooled, and often announces some wonder before the rest of perception has caught anywhere near up.

It’s been a quite peculiar few weeks of arduous struggle, in a friendship, digging deep, into self, into past selves, refreshing in drenched delights and pondering. And this is important: All along I have known that I was also being brewed. Tomorrow I set off for an adventure that I know will be confronting, beautiful, wild, difficult, vulnerable and tender. I am afraid and overjoyed.

And I am thankful for my own persevering in progress making, however uncertain, however unmeasurable, because now as I teeter on the brink of departure and arrival, I know that i have been equipped, and that quite soon I will really be Ready.

beautiful interlude

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It’s extremely beautiful in the garden today.

My life in this country has been fraught with existential friction. I was going to write difficulty and then I thought of the true difficulties of others who are trying to settle in an unknown land and I felt hesitant about attributing the same word to my own feelings of struggle, fear, loss, intimidation, and weariness.

Yet mysteriously, however harsh the feeling of – for me – difficulty has been in any given season, there has been a place of extreme beauty alongside me.

For a while it was the botanical gardens, or the balcony. Now it is this beautiful tiny communal garden where I found myself literally transported while needing a home and where I knew the moment I stepped into it that I would live. Not literally, fortunately – I discovered an apartment nearby – but almost.

Today the woodchips of the smaller paths have been replaced. I am not in the group responsible for paths so it’s as if a path angel has worked overnight. And this in addition to the sheer affectionate indulgence of all my flowers growing for me, flourishing, scenting, and my tiny wild strawberries, spontaneous and delicious, and someone else’s beautiful grey cat, who runs along to greet me and occasionally be stroked as long as I demonstrate no interest whatsoever.

Without these places of beauty, as if gifts from a divine hand, I would never have been able to sustain the adventure of this existence. Yet with this wild unfathomable joy, I am able to reach places I never would have believed, to dig into substance in myself, in the world, to pose stark questions and sometimes insist that they be answered, and to stretch myself fully to the far extent of my capacity and to see what happens when I try it, to elude or conquer intimidation, fear, dread, despair, the giants always set at odds with the expression of a deep and true self.

One day, I hope, this will all have more meaning, but for now, the meaning is that I am doing something true, and when it is very very difficult, I am soaked, drenched in beauty, and become healed and able to try again, to keep going, to give.

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.

an act of daring

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What has it all been about, this summer, this piano playing, this renewing of an inner studio?

At the end of a summer holiday in my home country, which contained an inner adventure, I found myself absolutely renewed, expanded, with the kind of glistening clarity I could barely have imagined possible. Derisory concerns and pettinesses of worry had cleared completely away, as if a whirlwind had gone through my life and left only the most beautiful things, hope.

I was effervescing with the delight of it and wild with the power of myself that had been as if launched within the exhilaration. I was ready for projects, expansions, longings, dreams…

And I returned home to endless, continuous difficulty, disruption, demand, discouragement and dread.

Hmmm.

The last few weeks have consisted of repeated attempts to rediscover, retrieve, establish, rediscover, retrieve this substance of myself. I am accustomed to such dynamics but rarely have they been so ferocious. The other day I was despairing with my friend about the endlessness of it and when I saw her yesterday she had had a thought.

There is a situation I had not quite been addressing, something where the difficulty of the dynamics were risking inner collapse, compromise instead of conviction. It was easy to argue the validity of succumbing to the pressure. Any reasonable acquaintance would have commiserated with me and left it, disconsolate but rational.

My friend is not entirely convinced of the life-deciding legitimacy of what currently passes for reason.

This is what you need to do, she declared, and then outlined what felt like, in the circumstances, the most preposterous, vulnerable and socially unconventional way of relating to the circumstances.

And I knew she was right.

Suddenly I knew, this was what my summer was about: And this is how I will complete the work of it.

Now, alongside the sheer endlessness of the weariness, I feel a glimmer of excitement.

(And fear).