being

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.

warm

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an unusually warm day.

time has slowed

though many are back to work.

sound of bees humming,

though they aren’t

not near me.

this morning I saw the murk of grey clouds harden into a covering that lifted right off

all at once

off the dawn sky

off the sunrise blossoming into day

off my heart

drifting away, I didn’t even pay attention because the dawn caught my breath

breathing sighs

among the warm breezes, among the back to work hum

an unusually warm day

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.

digging

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The process by which one unearths oneself from one’s life is highly mysterious to me. Is one’s life not oneself, for example, what self is being unearthed and from what other self? Why does one self feel like digging up another self? Why is it hard to do it? What happens if that self is not dug up? Why is there this sense of an unheard appeal from a self that to all intents and purposes is the same person. Who’s to say that what is being dug up is any more authentic or meaningful than the one who is, apparently, persuaded into digging.

Mysterious, and for the most part, unanswerable. There is some kind of appeal and it is somehow appealing. The one who responds to the call to dig is also mysterious, then. Why does she dig?

This digging is what I am spending my days on, so it seems, mining myself for something that is not certain, really to exist. I am so used to it that it feels certain to me. But I never know quite what I am digging for and sometimes when I have dug it up, whatever it is, I also don’t recognise it until later.

But nonetheless, the digging is part of me and so is the apparent regularity of sensing an appeal, often after weeks of performing at a high level other tasks and jobs that I actually do enjoy – I really don’t think I’m faking it. So then how does this part get so buried?

I am unusual in that I keep a daily journal and one of the very interesting elements of this practice is that one can visit oneself in any previous era of one’s life. Sixteen? I’m there, with my sixth form self, questioning the universe and pondering boys with my best friend. Twenty four? I’m there in a corporate job being appraised and wondering if I can get a mortgage on a flat in an aspirational area of a capital city, despite my frail pecuniary beginnings.

This week I have been revisiting selves of seven, five, and and three years ago, a year ago. It’s like digging in various layers of substrata and somehow I feel like I am getting somewhere, but where? It’s like lining up my younger selves in a row and interviewing them as witnesses to an event, the event of me, that I am somehow not quite able to grasp, and I’m relying on them to shed light on things.

Of course I talk to other people too, but almost none of them keep a record. Their thoughts are memories of memories. Mine are of their time.

I don’t know why it felt important to capture this thought in writing, but there is something that I’ve come to recognise as relatively unusual in this process, and this is on my mind as I continue it.