disruption

season shift II

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Finding the right position for the season shift is ongoing. This week has been somewhat severe in its insistence on change. The neighbours have returned to their apartment and I can no longer play the piano in the mornings. This week turned extremely cold with blustery rain, making my garden writing starts impossible. I have client projects beginning which take up substantial space in the week’s schedules, and I am wondering where to place and how to find time for the delicacy and sensitivity of writing, pondering, persisting, discovering. I had to retrieve various jumpers, tights and coats from the attic and the light garments of summer are soon to be banished to make space for them. Somehow these things also coincided with the unexpected completion of a writing project that has been going on for three years. Another one is starting but the disappearance, all of a sudden, of the previous project’s routine was a shock.

As you can see I have not quite come to a contentment in and embrace of autumn.

And yet I do love autumn joys. What is it that is clinging on inside me? An unspoken disappointment? Fear? A kind of seasonal abandonment making me feel bereft?

I’m being invited to surrender and I don’t want to. The season to come is going to be more demanding than the season I am leaving. It’s a fact.

Is it a fact?

As I write I peer into winter’s darkness I can see it as if lit up with a path of candlelight. This image of light is all the more striking this year as one of the themes of my work and life has been disruption over lighting. I will not go into it more here, but the very perception of a path of lights entices me a little, stirring a desire that has been starkly absent, refusing to emerge.

Hmmm a lit path… lit as if guiding a path to a beautiful place, though at night.

Perhaps this is the invitation I need to find a way through.

disturbance

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And then, not quite the moment I’d mentioned the word ‘rhythm’ but not long after, the pattern has been disturbed. I forgot to bring my journal home from the studio, disrupting my normal writing time first thing in the morning. Then I realised that my carefully-herded into a less obstructive timeslot client meeting now required a fully powered laptop, but that that the ageing battery was at 73% and could not be relied on to last. Rushing over to the studio where the charger had been left meant that there was no time to play the piano before I left home.

And so on and so on..

In the wider scheme of things these minor turbulences are, of course, negligible. But I cannot live my creative nature patrolled by the legitimacy police. My creative work is to try to shimmy myself into the tiny cracks of the most vulnerable, neglected places of (my) being. That process is easily disrupted and I cannot help but be protective of it. A luxury, one might remark, and yes, in the context of what is going on around us that luxury is stark. But in the context of my own story it’s not quite so indulgent as that term implies, and perhaps if our world spent a little bit more time and care on its vulnerable places we might sleep easier.

So then, disturbance (category: small, agreed). As the etmology unveils, it is disorder, grief, agitation, turmoil, bewilderment, muddying, stagnation.

In the lightness of this season though, the disturbance, while apparent, is less of a suffering. In one of my favourite television programmes, the idea of ‘stirring up the waters’ is seen as having value, of offering a way out of weary patterns.

Has my rhythm already become a confinement?

Unknown.

I traversed all the minor disturbances, and now I am back in a more or less calm serenity. Or do I delude myself? I am awaiting a message and that message may have power to truly disrupt me, so then, yes, perhaps I am serene, but I am also aware of something stirring the nature of this calm existence, something beyond my reach and beyond my control.

And I wonder what it has to offer?