shift, nearer

Yes, I went a little bit silent. Despite the sweet encouragements of the wordpress world (‘you’re on a [insert number here] day streak!’ I got absorbed into another direction.

I have been making a rhythm path into my creativity, but also, I notice now, my living.

As my creative practice is continually also an investigation into the nature of existence, the living and the art are closely intertwined. Deep shifts have been going on in my own deep life, old stories have been moving to take up new positions, new stories may or may not be being born, but they will only be able to be born if space is made for them.

Such a work is one of great tenderness and almost perpetual bewilderment, perseverance yes, and perhaps this is why this has been such a focus.

But now the shift has completed, or is completing, and then a new space is opening up. As usual the space comes with a sense of dizzying exposure alongside the delight. What will fill this space, what discoveries will get made, who will arrive to commune with it, how to protect it? It is a space for tiny flutterings and glimmerings yet as with all tender spaces most likely the giants of the land will be waiting to sneak in forbiddingly.

So I go gently and write and try to inhabit peace and trust. And to soak up and reveal in the creativity of a moment of blossoming freedom that comes rarely in life and is a gift of great power and beauty.

the studio inside, threshold

Persevering with the studio rhythm as a path to the studio inside is starting to pay off I notice.

Something that I did in the real studio rhythm was to record my morning piano playing, and then later to play it to myself. I am not sure what made this idea occur to me, because never before have I listened to my own playing, still with mistakes, hesitations and an overly long pause needed to turn the pages, as a source of joy. It took long years as an adult to recapture any of the delight of playing as a child, so painful was the décalage between my old competence and new ineptitude. And to actually record and listen back to myself was excruciating.

Yet here I am, and there is something in my own music. It’s mysterious to me.

So yesterday for the first time I played my music back to myself in the more ordinary setting of the apartment. I was a bit disconsolate and needed something to soothe the mean fears that had crept in to try to nibble on a new joy. And this playing filled the apartment with fully-human-with-all-her-errors-being. There is something in myself that is trying to tell something, to offer something to myself. What is it? Mystery.

But this, I realise, is part of the perseverance of the studio inside. And the playing of this yesterday made me feel today like I am on a threshold, and that soon I will be able to more fully live my creativity into the summer, even without the much longed for material studio. The elements are nearly all in place.

(I will know I am there when I am able to paint.)

persevering

It’s more than a week now since I left the studio. To hold a place for the studio inside continues to be a work.

However, I am persevering with the studio rhythm. Even though I am not making it all the way to to the kind of things I was doing in the studio, I am making a perseverance in the first steps. Surely soon I will break through to a new depth?

An assessment of the current state:

Most days:
Piano (Divenire is sounding more and more beautiful)
Writing: journal, blog, documentation

Absent:
Photoing
Painting and poems (I am writing some but they feel less fluid than the ones from painting)
Collage and found poetry (the most lighthearted work, which counter-intuitively needs more time; also I don’t have access to a photocopier, I’ve just noticed)

My bag of artist things (paints, pencils, brushes, photographs, camera) lies neglected in the corner of a cupboard.

On the other hand, a lot of productive things have been done in the realm of chores and catching up with people after crazy work. And I’ve helped a friend surprisingly move house.

In times like this I need to remember to treasure and nurture the times there are and not fret (note to self).

So then now I continue on my way with persevering.

the studio inside, a discovery

This morning, at long last after the wild month of June, I recovered my sense of myself and the poetics of my year (my explorations of the poetics of existence and what this means for me will have to wait til another time). It was a moment of delight. I found my other self, the one that I had been severed from by difficulty, demands and distress.

What was it that made me see into it? I am not quite sure but it was something about my July clearing and it made me look back to the last large event in my life (moving home, another longer story). Then I noticed that it was exactly nine months since this moment, a period of time which always speaks to me in a deep way, and lo and behold, yes indeed, as I started to map the timelines of this season, insights and memories emerged that I had completely forgotten and the poetic significance they have in my story suddenly re-emerged.

Perhaps they are not linked but in close proximity to this I made my discovery: There were rhythms in even my short studio week that made a path into my creativity. And what I noticed this morning is that, while the physical studio is not longer mine, and the studio inside is (as I noticed yesterday) somewhat vulnerable, there is this studio of the rhythm.

Perhaps I had already felt this lurking, but to truly alight on it felt splendid. And quickly I recognised: I can live the rhythms of the studio day into my no-studio day, and somehow I will have created some room of my own within the wilds of existence.

Of course I am not so naive as to think a studio rhythm will replicate entirely the emphatic (and political) reality of material space, but there is something in it, and I know it is going to make a space for something. A pathway to and shelter for the studio inside.

spring, dry ground

a time has passed, days
we are long acquainted, and yet
separate

desolate, oh desert,
dry of tears and dust of weeping
endless plains
pains

heat of long despair
nothingness of prayer

colonising silence
I struggle to give voice
to my love’s song

deep and full within me
bubbling, turbulent
sweetness, warm and cool
a rain stored centuries
for you, hope

a stirring,
yet prisoned

break through,
ancient hope of truth,
beauty and delight,
break through

silence, hard and fierce
refusal,
my love’s song,
discouraged
deepens

a stirring
yet prisoned

distillation of sweet days
flowers, birds and beauty
resdolent with meaning,
moments bathed in wonder
atoms dancing, molecules
in song,
renewal’s promise
eternal
a sea, a stream, a storm
a purity of force

suddenly a rushing
unbidden, a fierceness,
filtering a crack, sudden, sudden

silence

a spring
ancient spring
I effervesce my wealth
raucous with abandon
liquid laughter
embraces stale silence
to life
baptises austerity
bathes pains
flows, flows, flows

Note: this poem is a work in progress and, interestingly to me, encapsulates in its in-progress state the very tensions intended to be present in the image of the poem that came to me this morning. I hope to come back to this image and poem at point with greater completeness. But for now the very representations of my own inner state of fullness and frustration evident in the not-quite-working feeling (at least to me) of the poem are wryly comforting.