adventure

a bare place

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In my artist summer seasons there is a pattern which seems to recur but is almost impossible to prepare for.

I arrive to it, exhausted and colonised by work.

I’m simultaneously ravenous for, afraid of, wrongly orientated for, unable to reach the freedom I have longed for for months.

The muscles of artist living and freedom enjoying have atrophied, replaced by obedience to structures I had no say in making.

I start playing the role of the version of myself that most recently inhabited the freedom, but without the inner substance all my attempts are flimsy and I feel vulnerable and frail and ashamed and disappointed that what I have longed for I am not enjoying, if even I can admit to feeling disappointed or ashamed, which usually I can’t because along with the obedience to structures I’ve lost the power to feel or speak my feelings.

I cast around for rescuers and they all disappoint me because I can only do the work myself, but this disappointment makes me feel despair.

I make indirect appeals for encouragement and validation but those too get ignored.

I feel pain.

With the wisdom of having experienced this pattern I have often pre-planned a container event that will preserve me through this turbulence. A visit to a museum, a favourite book.

This works well to prompt glimpses of the joy that will be there, but usually it’s so flimsy that one tricky conversation or unnecessary appeal for my time, responsibility or energy will distract me and the cunning plan will disintegrate.

Somewhere in here I might see an early sign of true substance.

This gives me the hope to persist.

The turbulence starts to become more manageable. The loops of disorientation repeat but their power starts to diminish. I am building the muscles of artistic practice again. I start to gain confidence. I start to remember who I am.

Eventually I will reach the mid point and all hell will break loose again.

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.

progress

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Well, I seem to be making progress although the measurements of that progress are often contested.

How do I measure it?

It’s a certain feeling – strength – that I can see returning to me. The familiar places of physical demand are not so depleting, the balance of the equation has shifted. I’m less emotionally raw, although that may be because I have had a respite from certain circumstances.

But mostly, it’s because I am getting to things that have long been out of reach, either practically or metaphorically or both. Yesterday I started the rereading of a long-written book draft, ready to, eventually, edit the second half and Send It Out once and for all. I’m connecting with people whose requests I have long let drift, taking up the tools of places in myself that have been beyond my grasp due to demands and the sheer limitations of one person’s confinement in the human condition.

There is a giddy euphoria at the return of a recognisable self that often entails overly enthusiastic ambitions and subsequent disappointments. This may indeed recur, as it’s part of personality dynamics which my whole life I have not escaped. But I’m perhaps also a little wiser, taking more time, letting things establish themselves more fully before I gallivant everywhere for the sheer joy of feeling more true.

It’s so particular that this specific space, of writing, and in writing so discovering something, has so much power for me. I am thankful, despite the flimsiness, so it feels, of my reach.

feeding and renewing

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It continues. The discernment of wild forces was strengthening in itself. So too was the realisation that staying in position was the place of hope.

So I stayed while everyone left.

Stayed still. Not rushing hither and thither. Stayed in the small circumference of the garden, the seaside, the station and the park. Dwelling myself into home, to wholeness, to hope and to trust.

I did ordinary things. Tending the flowers, the laundry, the thoughts and the imagination.

It seemed like nothing. But the seeming was not true.

The staying still revealed the rush of everything; long days at work, long calls listening to friends, trains, planes, fretful self-displacements searching for places to hide, be found, regroup, distract.

The more the rush appeared, the more the stillness showed its value.

I’m still not there yet, not there, a somewhere that some part of me knows I am going towards but cannot speed up, or even really know where it is, just that it is. There is a somewhere and part of me knows how to get there.

The rest of me must follow, blind.