artist

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…

hush again

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It’s very particular to do walk towards another summit so soon after the last one.

In a way I have rarely experienced, the thrill of joy from the first summit is making even the weary days towards the second one more delightful and with less doubt and will-I-make-it hesitation.

I somehow feel that it has been set up this way; that he joy of the first summit was designed all along to propel me to the second, perhaps more complex summit. Pause. Definitely more complex.

Today it’s sunny for the first time in over a week. It’s beautiful in the studio with the pink roses given by a friend dotted around, showing signs of love and support.

I’m waiting for the afternoon to tell me how to live it. Tomorrow is another big day, and it’s the last day in this studio, requiring also dismantling all my work and moving it all, before it will be truly completed.

There is a beautiful kind of hush in the room… it feels like the stillness before something extraordinary occurs.

Which it is.

double summit

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Yes, I am existing in the thrill of yesterday’s summit triumph.

It is rare in life to be able to revel in the joy of a coming victory without doubts as to whether it may occur, but I had the most luminous day preparing my work to be shown. Then, as it turns out, many many visitors came to see the summer’s work in the open studio; the first time this has ever happened to me. I was dazzled and dizzy with the sheer wondrousness of the warmth, joy and interest of the visitors, a delight it had never even occured to me to dream of in my old existence.

Yet the day held a slight surprise: a double summit.

It was like this: the day was scheduled with a friend also visiting, during which visit I was planning a daring act. But the friend came impossibly late for such a conversation. While I might have expected to be disappointed, it turned out that I had needed the whole day to prepare for the evening event and it would have been terribly compromising to it to curtail the getting ready work. While I might have expected to feel bereft, it turned out that the friend would be able to visit for the act of great daring on Monday.

All in all the dynamics felt like those of grace, but it does mean that the work of this weekend is not entirely completed. One summit has been surmounted, but what I had not grasped is that there were two summits all along, and the second is spaced from the first by two days of travel.

So although today is a moment of respite, it is not a moment of descent. Attention and focus need to be retained, along with the dynamics of trust, hope and grace.

It is bravery of another kind, and another call to patience. But I have the delight of the first triumph to sustain me along the way, what joy.

a glimpse of the summit – patience

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Despite trying to take care of this week moving towards the summit, yesterday I stumbled repeatedly, finding myself tripped by other people’s frailties and my own.

It was so wearying.

The patience of last few steps towards the summit is gossamer thing. Already vast reserves of it have been used up. It has been stretched beyond capacity, grown, stretched and grown many times. The spiritual force that all patience requires has been used, replenished, used, replenished.

The wearing away of reserves reveals the last hard edges of being, that are to be smoothed with the difficulties of triumph. It is a marathon runner in the last yards, it is a woman in the final pushes of birth, it is a rare glimpse of real, piercing through all the clutter of modern being.

Today discipline was not enough, disintegration was needed. Somewhere beneath the known there was more to be found, and tears were needed to find it. It is such a mystery how discipline intermingles with humility, the controlled with the surrender. Both are needed towards the summit, but only in the surrender is there grace – and patience.

I feel more fragile but I’m stronger than yesterday.

I’m being born/e.

a glimpse of the summit

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I will make it.

I’m not there yet, I’m not nearly there, but something has arrived within me, ahead.

Certainty.

It’s hard to put the feeling of it into words, but it is deep, a plunging power of thrill, resolution, satisfaction and desire.

Yesterday evening as I wrote to a friend I recalled a theory from my research; in a moment, I could see exactly where I was, and exactly where I was about to be.

In the writing of one of my favourite mountaineers, there are sometimes climbs where this sudden advance knowledge arrives. It’s mysterious as it does not always occur. But when it does, it contains a thrill of power and hope which cannot be concocted. Even more mysteriously, sometimes it is this very power and hope which actually enable the achievement; without that vital last shot of energy, it might never have been reached.

It is also something to take care of. The thrill of certainty carries its own risk of intoxication by euphoria. The very relief can make one careless. The precious substance of conviction needs itself to be channeled into ways both focused and diligent, to enable it to fulfil its own promise.

Today: lists.