hope

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.

blows and beauty

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I was radiant with hope
delighting in the beauty
the truth, luminous over
my being, my story.

Blows rained down,
as if a cudgel to the heart
yet mere words.

You took my fears
as a script, copied
the old patterns
I thought I had, perhaps
eluded.

You crushed all joy from me
dismissing that it once
was shared, that depth,
the wonder of a true
communion.

Or was it? Certainty you
sowed with doubt, did you?
were you? how could you?
To our dreaming together you said,
no, alone.

An uncanny insistence
growls irritable from deep within me.
Trust your heart; your
own wisdom is truth.
Believe yourself.

What do I say to you now?
Can I undo myself from the
places you have
conveniently assigned for me
not to cause disturbance
not to trouble your
nice new story?
to elude the work
of making ground?

Can I heal from the idol
jailer of your own captivity?

My battle now is yours,
unfought.

I am not ruled by
convenience or comfort.
I seek truth.
Your blows have momentarily discouraged me
My wounds will heal
A mere skirmish, I will announce,
My laughter will return.
I will dance again.

I have lived this story before,
perhaps, yes,
some may say
but now I’m wiser

I untwist the events from your grasp
evil prophet,
I laugh giddy at my freedom, my knowing
this time the story will belong to beauty.

perseverance – suspendue en l’air – testing

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It’s the last morning, I think, of la vie suspendue en l’air. Several things that felt linked to this liminal space are shifting. I’m not really ill. The absent friend returns today. I have to take up some work next week. And some other things. This week I have almost entirely completed the gathering of the journals of my self, decades of self it is hard to believe. And they are all stacked there, in boxes, a kind of double of me, made out of paper, or a self portrait.

I’ve been having such a beautiful time, and then imperceptibly, I wasn’t. Was it my beautiful garden being disturbed by drunken chatter while I ate my lunch, or a sudden host of probably very sweet teenage boys, but in a posse that reminded me of the ancient vulnerability of womanhood. Was it things suddenly breaking and being hard to mend? Was it hearing the disappointment in a friend’s voice that I couldn’t be there for her? Or looking back over old photos for another friend’s hen party and being starkly confronted with certain losses? Or, finding that, after all my efforts, in fact two journals had been overlooked and they belonged to the least accessible boxes of heavy books, that what I thought I had triumphantly accomplished, I hadn’t?

All of them, of course, accumulating unseen, many trivial by their very nature, but poking at a vulnerable spot.

I woke in the same bed with the same view and the same life as all the other mornings, and instead of being filled with happiness, I was uncontestably sad.

So began, as usual, a little digging through the moments of the day, turning things over, pondering them, on the look out for a deeper significance to the turbulence, or if there wasn’t one, how to tame the circumstances back to towards a collaboration.

And I found something, whichever one it is, from my memories of similar times, similar patterns of being and becoming.

Often, on the brink of some completion, small or large obstacles appear. It is a fact of all the completions I have ever accomplished. And I used to fret about it, because a completion moment is by its nature vulnerable, and often accompanied by the intense weariness of a long perseverance.

But now I am wiser: What looks like fretful and often personal obstructions can conceal an important opportunity. The need for one final, conclusive effort to overcome the hindrances, to insist on the completion is what makes the work truly complete. It is what establishes the work and the substance, its power and its resilience.

So I look courage from the appearance of minor upsettling events, and summoned a deeper intention. The completion and I will prevail. The discouragements will not. The old thrill returned from somewhere buried. I am excited for what will happen next. Yes, and grown enough to announce that hope.

la vie suspendue en l’air – pretending unconsciousness

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Toujours là.

Yesterday’s recognition of an importance to là vie suspendue en l’air was at once an encouragement and a danger.

When the work of deep substance is going on, too many overly conscious or rational thoughts can disturb the process.

As someone who is often a galloping herd of conscious and rational thoughts, in particular, stories, the moment the recognition that a work of deep substance is afoot is the moment all sorts of theories and ‘good ideas’ can line up presenting themselves as the way to ‘manage’ the process.

One of my wildest works, now that I have actually surrendered to the silence, is to stay out of the way of myself while whatever takes place takes place. To give it space and not to intrude, bustling, with ‘are you ready yet?’ and ‘would you like a cup of tea?’.

The only way I have found to do this is to pretend as if an unconsciousness that anything might be going on at all, to pay an almost excessive reverent attention to everyday rhythms and chores, albeit it quietly, and, then, to avoid those who might see my quiet as a chance to visit their stories and theories onto my existence. I skirt the contours of myself, respectfully, and hope that by carefully holding my attention elsewhere, I can allow the mystery of the luminous uncanny the time it needs to accomplish its fullness.

toujours suspendu en l’air

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I’m still here, in mid-air, which is uncannily like a depth, it turns out. In the wrestling match between maintaining a normal pace and slowing down, slowing down has won. And yet now I’m here, I feel strangely at home. I don’t feel the fret of missing out, I’m no longer disappointed, I’m kind of content, and curious, because at other points in my life when I have found myself in this imposed suspension, often something very deep has been at work, beyond my thoughts, words, understanding or control.

So it’s a little bit like I’ve set up tent here, in mid-air, and now find myself delighted. It’s so peculiar; how can I resist it so much and then turn out to be glad? Sometimes I feel like I don’t know myself at all; I can sometimes so little predict my true feelings about things that are in prospect.

I am still playing the piano (although today I didn’t because the neighbour was using the apartment) and writing, but I have seemingly slipped into a complete harmony with quietness and ordinary chores. Small unexciting things are getting done and I’m not feeling lonesome or deprived.

And the deeper stillness means that I’m more aware of the rumblings of movements in unknown places, and this awareness increases my patience because instead of fearing nothing, I can feel something. And what is a creative process for if not to prepare a space to welcome and embrace that?