hope

perseverance: suspendu en l’air

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There I was all in persevering mode with happenstances aplenty and ferocious efforts and all of a sudden (well actually it snuck up on me):

Heat, and a cough.

It sounds so prosaic. Probably it’s meant.

All my wishes, intendings and momentum are scrambled. I am slowed down in a kind of ancient and insistent pace. I can’t do the things I wish to do; I can’t go to the places I want to go. It’s the first summery weather here for weeks and I can’t cycle to the seaside or bear to lie on a hot rock even if I got there. I’m in a continual internal argument with Little Miss High Achiever who seemingly cannot help but persist in believing that concrete reality is for losers and wishes should triumph. (And I should have compassion on her because indeed the feeling of disappointment is intolerably near to defeat).

I am well enough to do this and that (here I am after all, and I played the piano although the piece sounds slightly less rippling punctuated by a rasping cough). But it is as if everything has been suspended in mid air, that a certain kind of time has stopped and I’ve arrived into a different one, chronology displaced by eternity.

Oh the wriggling and squirming before this kind surrender.

But yes, I let go of everything, I choose to let the moment of suspendu en l’air be a kind of grace to me, to whatever is going on. (And somehow it is always a consolation to experience the exquisite perfection of the phase in French).

Something beyond me is at work, and in accepting this I find a renewal of hope.

new terrain

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stumbling, almost certainly,
dazed and blinded by
new light
the exposure
vast expanse of space
foreboding
joy

steady myself
‘we’re here now’
tend to immediate needs
gentleness, cool water
supplies, details of
beauty

orientate
or fail to
unfamiliarity blurs
vistas to a mist

stay still stay still
come home to yourself
sense on high alert
senses
sensations
sense? sense
stillness reaps,
something moves beneath
the surface
knowing something
knowing nothing

still, longer
tend yourself
attend, wait, let it
grow substance with you
test it
strengthen beyond
an impulse to a
passion

presence of the giants
of fear
ancient guardians
fomenting fury
don’t let go
hold your position
sense
stay still, you are the giant here
let them run
let them hide

a certain
confidence of motion
trust a bedrock
we have been here before
never, often

straighten up, let
your burdens
stabilise your steps
move in

shift, nearer

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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.

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.

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.