creativity

mid-point

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Maybe I reached the mid-point.

All hell broke loose anyway. Trained as I am to look for symmetries in literature, I look for the same symmetries in the stories of my own life.

Often there is a turbulence around the most important point.

Something is trying to break in or out and something else is resisting it.

It’s exhausting and my own choices will be the flap of the butterfly’s wings that make completion or collapse.

Or at least my own choices are all that I can affect personally; destiny, other people, circumstances are not for me to decide.

In the middle of the turbulence I must summon everything within me to hold steady to what I know is most true, most full of hope, most kind.

If I hold steadier than the resistance presses on me, the depth of something else will break through.

I will be past the mid-point.

I still may not know what the something else is until much later.

The turbulence will persist for some days.

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.

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.

depths and trees

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It’s such a mysterious work of the depths.

Also when just now there is almost no one who sees me. Including here, I notice.

Yet in this mysterious strange quietude, shifts of substance are taking place.

In my teens I once wrote a poem about my essence having deserted me. It’s on my mind now.

I am going about my day, a little bit drifting, a luxury after so much structured work. Just now it’s also very stormy weather. I tumble into reveries, watching the trees. The branches so wild, the trunk so still. The branches terrifyingly wild, it sometimes seems. It’s a shock that they can be tethered to any stillness at all, but they are, and the tree trunks look immoveable.

They are comforting me. Though the wildness of my current living feels ferocious, somewhere, also true, is the peace of a truly established being, with roots which go all the way to the source of life, which carry sustenance and which enable growing and straining. I am taking up everything I need to grow, and I am not hollow and will not, despite my feelings, snap in two when it feels too much.

I won’t. So the trees reassure me.

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.