creativity

self again

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

Somehow here the self exists. What is it about writing to total strangers that allows her to skip about a bit, joyfully?

How did I find myself hemmed in with responsibilities that crush what I find so very valuable and precious?

The responsibilities are precious too.

Why am I particularly unable to feel my deepest feelings unless I have acres of time and space, and beauty? Other people seem to dwell in their feelings all the time.

The particular excavation it takes me to unearth a truly honest felt-response despite the glare of inconvenience, disapproval and doubt is so arduous.

I’ve got summer panic; the sensation that before I have had a chance to find her again I will find myself boxed up and transported to Other Things. That we will endure another forced separation. That I will spend my life in the journey between returning to retrieve her and the rushing back to fulfil my commitments. That I will be forever swimming down to the depths to discover the deep secrets only to find, on glimpsing a treasure, that it’s time to be back at the surface. That the treasures of the depths will continually elude us, because of the clamour in which our lives so continuously take place.

reticence

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

I went to the watercolour museum and, at the last minute, forgot my phone.

Hmm. Do I go back, arrive late?

Hmm. Will anyone miss me? Is it callous to disappear if someone might be worried?

On the tram I ask a stranger to borrow their device and smugly reproduce from memory the mobile number of my mother. Please can you text x and y so that they don’t worry.

(Later I heard that she’d glanced at the strange number and dismissed the message as a scam. <Delete>)

I was unexpectedly free.

We all know this. We’ve read the articles in newspapers, the lack of phone now noteworthy enough to represent paid-for content.

But it’s real, the freedom.

I caught a bus and was delivered both to the seaside, and to an earlier self, the one, perhaps, that traveled around Europe on a career break just in time to have witnessed those places before smart-phones, selfies and repeat-posing. In time to experience community with strangers in a way that would never exist again.

Well, that still did not exist.

Or to a deeper self, a more mysterious self, the self of summers and depth-of-winters and sweetness and the self that knows innocent things and yet has the wisdom of ancient and commonplace experience.

It was as if all my responsibilities had been left behind, both the real ones but also the symbolic ones in that device, and then the reticent self emerged and coalesced for a little while, and I didn’t dare think too much about it in case I lost her too suddenly.

We saw the exhibition. We ate lunch in the sun. We swam. We took photos of textures and time.

Then the end was coming and of course as I approached home, dozy with the sun and hum of a phone-less journey, she slipped away.

And I am left to ponder if there is any real-life-compatible way to appeal to her.

self/ish

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

Are you there, self?

Or have you given up,
understandably
as you have been
intolerably neglected.

I coax you with delicious morsels
(Look a fun moment with friends!
Look, the beauty of the garden!
Soon we will bike to the seaside!)
as to a mouse, in its hole
Am I a cat to you?
Is that why you hide,
timid?

I deliver monologues
explaining everything, patiently
as if to a small child whose mother
culpably, had to depart
for work, or an evening out.
Who cares? You left me.

You will not be reasoned back
You will not be controlled
You will not diminish
all those weary days.

But if I wait patiently and listen,
go about the necessary tasks,
forgiving myself at least and others, being
merciful,
perhaps suddenly you will be there
before I have really noticed
and then something new will begin.

storm

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

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.

double summit

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

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.