I have spent the summer tending ‘the studio inside’ after my one week residency in June. The communal garden has been a studio. And my neighbours’ apartment with their piano. But the days are getting colder and soon the neighbours will return to inhabit their city home full time.

I returned from holiday and two absences stared me sternly in the face. Indisputable and unmoveable. One was the absence of a studio.

I am a very joyful person and quite good at smoothing over bumps and being grateful where gratitude can reside, but somehow the absence of a studio is very stern, and immune to substitutions or platitudinous comfort. There is a joy in a studio which literally nothing can replace. This is a mystery to me. I’m somewhat reluctant to concede this ground.

But maybe starkly facing our absences has an importance? So I pondered to myself.

Into this absence I said a fierce prayer. If your commitment to existence is not to control your longings nor to detach from them, both of which constitute a harsh diminishment of human being, and if you refuse to despair, a fierce prayer is mostly what is left. I leave the deeper questions for another time, but in this case I was astonished to find, shortly thereafter, I was sitting in a studio again. A temporary arrangement, but astonishing nonetheless.

I reviewed the writing I did here at the start of the summer. I pondered the renovation of ‘the studio insight’ and now reflecting, this is indeed what has happened. Through piano, plants, play, seaside, parties, festivals and dancing, many of the old broken places have been substantially mended.

The day I heard I would have a studio, a project took shape in my being. Since that day, a series of disruptions have overwhelmed my daily life. This is a recognisable and now almost encouraging pattern showing that I am on to something.

This does mean however that some of the renovating got trashed so now I am attending to that.

But there is a deep thrill in the heart of the project, and its existence cannot be prevented.