existence

feeding perseverance

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Today there was a certain new joy in persevering with the rhythm that will sustain the studio inside.

Alongside other chores, yesterday I had two calls with old friends, and although in a way both of them were need and I was helping (listening, which I am not always good at), the quality of the (re)connection – (‘re’, because we have been so little in contact in the ferocious wildness of the last two years) was very deep. They’ve both known me a long time, and although there is a certain element of them knowing a me that I no longer am, there is also a knowing of a me that I deeply am and will always carry with me, that newer friends will never truly know.

Then I cycled to the seaside on my bike, taking with the picnic food that my mother always makes for my family’s seaside trips, simplicity itself yet with the soul of a thousand small memories.

It is not totally the case that I have cleverly made a joy happen; it’s partly the sheer fact that after persevering with so many chores and so much work, some of them are now done. There is a loosening into the necessary tasks of the day. I am at liberty to untangle thing more, to create more freedom. I note to myself the importance of not accidentally accumulating more.

Nonetheless, I am aware of a kind of deeper nourishment. My soul is resting. My perseverance can come from a deeper place, from the deep heart rather than from a certain kind of drier (yet for a time necessary) intention.

In the middle of my life I found myself in a beautiful garden. I’ve longed for one, and although I expected it to be in a more conventional house and of a more private nature, the one I have tumbled into is a continuing wonder; a collective small garden converted from a tiny park, in the middle of the city, with small allotment boxes with the growings of strangers who are becoming known, and a communal, collectively tended vegetable garden from which I can at will pick spinach, herbs, beans, potatoes.

I feed my perseverance by putting myself in the path of beauty and trying not to neglect the wondrousness of existence, by a collaboration.

persevering

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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.

bloom

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Did a bud unfurl
in the garden?

Silence, birdsong,
intermittent conversation
overheard, on phone,
passing by

What was it that
held us
steady against the wind?

Branches trembling
Grasses shimmer
a frisson of petals,
scent

You held peace for us
eyes closed, a prayer?
mine roamed everywhere,
wondering
stealing a peek
at you who had
quite astonishingly
arrived.

Who are you to me?
Who will you be?
What were we doing there?
A beginning, a wish
full or frail?

Is a bud unfurling?
I cannot trust my senses,
hope.

descent

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I find myself
long ago,
remains of memory
scraps

What were you to me?
I ask him,
whom I never saw again.

And you, who meant so much to me
at the time
what were you? a vanishing?

I pick my way between the
haunting presences,
strangely comfortable and familiar
they don’t answer
neither did they

passive
controlling
hiding in their baggage
I poke at them a final time
what have you to say for yourself?
you?

silence, their ancient
language, patrolling my
invisibility, eliminating me
slowly
colluding,
familiarity chokes me

Who did this to you?
they don’t reply
I forgive them.

the studio inside, a discovery

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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.