becoming

constellation

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While I have been fretting about the presence or absence of the innocent and ancient self, other things have been going on, which I somehow did not connect.

It’s been a time of furious difficulty. And in this difficulty I’ve been unusually lost.

I have chosen a life of particular exposure to the wilds of existence, and yet normally I know where I am. I have an inner stability borne of experience and love.

The last months have been like a battering. Certainly not comparable to other terrible events elsewhere, but for a self that wants to make creative work, crushing.

After every wham of difficulty I have tried to regroup, only to (sometimes) glimpse a moment of arrival before, wham, some other violence to my body, self, relationships, possessions, work…

After months of bravery, suddenly it was too much. I was distressed, tearful, lost. Plus the endless noise disturbance of the sound injury fills every moment of potential rest.

No wonder the delicate self was not keen on showing up.

Today I reflected on various ‘solutions’ that had been proffered in the last week: Get new friends, take a flight, look online, try America.

All of them, I could feel, were like trying to tack a threadbare patch over a crater and hope for the best.

A deeper part of me thanked the offerers and explained, yes, this seems like a sensible option, but it is not enough. I cannot thrash around trying to fix things.

This morning I realised what was really going on. I was being intimidated out of staying in position, by who knows what force, but the one we often concede to.

The recognition summoned a deeper ally: No.

No I will not back down.

No I will not make compromises.

No I will not fritter away truth.

No I will not choose my path based on fear, mockery and pressure.

Nothing much has changed in the circumstances.

But in the inner situation, the clarity is like a protecting force.

Maybe she will come out now that she knows she will not be betrayed.

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…

a rip in the fabric of reality

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I made it to the second summit.

The second summit was, you may recall, the daring act, a conversation with a friend.

It turned out to be very difficult to carry out, and strange.

First the day was very disrupted. I could not find the right thing to wear, the weather being milder than it looked, and the day holding multiple, contradictory-suitable-outfit events. I managed to leave the house to find that the logistics of the day were totally different to that which I had imagined. I could not conceive of how I would be able to do everything that I was responsible for doing and still carry out the daring act. But I must carry it out, of that I was certain. Also, it was classic that circumstances were seemingly to conspire yet again to obstruct the accomplishment of anything remotely important to me.

Breathe in, breathe out; it’s wild near the summit. This is what I told myself.

And this was indeed the precisely correct approach because the circumstances tamed themselves down into a harmony almost poetic in its perfection.

But still, the daring act remained to be done.

The friend arrived, and to my shock, brought along another set of conspiring circumstances. I was totally shocked, having made clear, I was certain, of the need for some space. The slot I was now allocated was almost offensive in its brevity.

As I took in the new reality, I pondered, do I even go ahead now? Could what I had to do even be carried out in such unprepossessing conditions?

Suddenly total conviction took hold of me. It was the day of the summit; who knew when I would get another attempt.

I completed my daring act of sharing in twenty five minutes. My friend looked utterly startled.

And rushed off to the next item on the days agenda.

But the daring act had been accomplished, and perhaps all the more emphatically for the intensity of the conditions.

Now: descent. Something that also needs care.

I also have keys to a new borrowed piano.