creativity

defiance

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Things are getting more intense…

Sometimes it’s hard to know if the feeling of intensity are merely the effect of personal failings: Is it really circumstances that are so difficult or it is my own immature refusal to accept things as they are?

I’ve had another day of frustrations. Some things have been good but it’s wearying to find that in yet another day my places of replenishment have somehow been turbulenced and tangled.

I’m squiggling around wondering whether to give up on my beautiful hopes, if my relentless insistence on believing in the beautiful, the good, in the unfolding in certain places of something different to what has gone before, is itself the problem.

Or am I squiggling with that or just with the part of myself that is severely reluctant and unable to be dissolved by chaos? It is so utterly astonishing to me what people talk themselves into settling for.

Or am I meant to surrender? An act of humility?

The things is this: I am not seemingly called to make up abstract theories and self-hypnotising stories about why this or that has not happened, will never happen. I’m called to persevere into things that have not been seen before. And that in this world, things are needed that no-one has seen before. Or perhaps things that have been seen before, but that need to be resurrected for the current age.

I’m getting nearer to a point of breakthrough, a rip in the fabric of existence (my own at least, and since my life is part of existence, I call it ‘existence’ plain and simple). This, I’m afraid to say, almost always coincides with situations becoming more impossible. Why is this? I don’t know, but I’ve seen it before. In such circumstances, persistence in itself becomes miraculous long before whatever is being sought arrives.

A note to myself: don’t fall into self-pity. This bit is always rife with traps. Your lovely friends let you down; they didn’t realise that they were being sucked into the maelström that precedes the new. Forgive, forgive, forgive, keep going.

Something stronger, somehow than perseverance: Defiance. Dis-trust of the visible in the pursuit of the unseen. Not relying on that in which security is commonly sought.

Believing in another reality, trusting that, letting it take the weight of risk, believing.

A week to go until the daring act. Stay with it; focus.

These are the things I tell myself.

In the studio – new space

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Indeed the garden studio season has ended and mercifully I do have a studio space. It’s one I’ve not inhabited before which makes various kinds of particular dynamics in the use of the space. Surprisingly, it has a piano in it, although an electric one so not suitable for playing (not for me!) but it has a symbolic power which is encouraging given that my attempts to continue my playing are currently being thwarted.

I have a lot business work and so the studio does not quite have the purity of moments when I can focus solely on creativity. I am navigating and negotiating through my days, working out where the pockets of insistence should be, and where I must gracefully embrace the demands of the moment.

Being thwarted from playing the piano means that I am continually losing the the thread of some self that I have cultivated in the summer. When I have lost her I wake up feeling on edge. This self is seemingly under threat and I am doing everything in my power to protect her existence but it is arduous work and seemingly meeting with continual opposing forces. This is almost certainly not my imagination; I have been here before and it is what happens when I am near something important in the fabric of existence.

Somehow writing here tremendously helps me find and hold on to the thread, and not let go under any circumstances. So here I am, again, holding on for dear life, the very truest sense.

season shift – completion

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I’m here in the garden listening to the piano music I recorded while I was away on the business trip (at the airport, and you can hear the airport mini trucks beeping here and there, as well as airport hubbub and occasional announcements).

It’s the last day I will be able to sit like this in the garden this year. At the weekend the picnic tables and chairs and benches will be stored for the winter.

As so often happens, the moment itself is not as difficult as the anticipation of the moment.

The sun is shining, the wind is mild and the flowers and plants wave around me.

All that I have lived in this miraculous garden this summer is welling up within me. The sheer surprise of it, the gift of its unimaginable beauty, the joy of the comings and goings of other gardeners, the sweet events of afternoon teas, meditation with someone who might become special to me, birthday celebration with old friends and new neighbours, semi-adopting the sweet cats, picking, delighting in and sharing flowers, running here first after trips away, to check on my plants, to be home.

Sometimes life is difficult but sometimes grace effuses itself from who knows where and overwhelms the pains with its unexpected, astonishing beauty.

Such has been this garden to me in a quite wild summer, inside me, around me, and beyond me in the world which sometimes feels like it is collapsing under the weight of its own pains, its own lostness.

At the start of the summer I pondered whether the rhythm of this garden would help me restore ‘the studio inside’. It has. It has been the most exquisite open-air studio anyone could wish for. Now it is going to be allowed to rest while already I have been provided with a ‘real’ indoor studio. What grace again.

The music is ending, but, in a way I love so much, it ends on a note of incompleteness, an interrupted cadence, a kind of resolution with expansion in prospect, a generosity to what will come next…

season shift

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Here in northern Europe there is an undeniable season shift.

I am not always good in seasonal transitions. Sometimes I drag my heels, severely reluctant to embrace something new, even spring. Perhaps especially spring with its vulnerability and newnesses.

A few weeks ago I went though an episode of not-enough-summer panic. This happens to me when the sunny days of summer have not amounted to enough to banish the severity of winter from my being, something that is more pressing when winters cling on into April and even May. This year it was more ferocious because of working relentlessly in June, so that my actual summer felt like it did not start til mid-July whereupon it coincided with wild winds and tempestuous days and finding myself ill in the only sunny ones.

Anyhow, as is the way of things, the panic turned out to be completely unfounded because I recovered to find myself tipped into a month of seeming endless sunshine, festivals, picnics, swimming and holiday. I am replenished in deep places and have a moment to contemplate autumn.

Somehow my replenishment seems to be contested. It really is there, I am certain, but doubts seem to circle around. I want to give myself over to autumn, to the thrills small – new stationery, new fashions redolent of school uniform – and large – wild projects, startling insights, new initiatives.

I am finding my way into the right position to surf the wave of autumn. My ambitions feel like they wildly outstrip the meagreness of chronological time, a perennial dilemma. But, as I tell myself, it is all in the positioning. So I write my way into this approach and that, testing things.

I want to embrace and delight in this season from the deep contentment, from a peaceful inner order. It feels like a kind of maturity and a sign of my own new inner harmony.

So I have been clearing some spaces and taking care of things and not letting new projects run away with themselves, but serve the older yet equally important places of consolidation and honouring existing commitments.

And writing my way into the right inner posture, taming myself.

childhood piano

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child
sitting there, legs dangling
enthralled, wondering
playing notes as
precisely, intentionally as a
Phd researcher,
though four years old

girl
sitting there, music room
stuffy, piano teacher
aside, seeing notes
black marks on black lines
pure

girl, still, though older
sitting there, wishing
her father was not so emphatic
my daughter could play that piano,
a contortion, playing
another person’s tune

teenager
sitting there,
aplomb, the one who can
accompany the orchestra
glory, approval,
satisfaction

young woman
sitting there, university
practice room, ‘perhaps you
can teach me?’ – she fails to recognise
an offer of intimacy,
and why should she?
she is absorbed

twenties
long absence, no room
in the small spaces, none
in time either

thirty-something
sitting there, new home
space, although it’s squeezed up to the sofa
new teacher,
horror at performing,
at persistent error,
inepitude,
shaking with it

forties
sitting there, new home
old piano abandoned to old existence
yet grace, magic
though borrowed, a queen’s instrument
peace, beauty, renovation, reunion
soul.