inner life

In the studio – new space

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Indeed the garden studio season has ended and mercifully I do have a studio space. It’s one I’ve not inhabited before which makes various kinds of particular dynamics in the use of the space. Surprisingly, it has a piano in it, although an electric one so not suitable for playing (not for me!) but it has a symbolic power which is encouraging given that my attempts to continue my playing are currently being thwarted.

I have a lot business work and so the studio does not quite have the purity of moments when I can focus solely on creativity. I am navigating and negotiating through my days, working out where the pockets of insistence should be, and where I must gracefully embrace the demands of the moment.

Being thwarted from playing the piano means that I am continually losing the the thread of some self that I have cultivated in the summer. When I have lost her I wake up feeling on edge. This self is seemingly under threat and I am doing everything in my power to protect her existence but it is arduous work and seemingly meeting with continual opposing forces. This is almost certainly not my imagination; I have been here before and it is what happens when I am near something important in the fabric of existence.

Somehow writing here tremendously helps me find and hold on to the thread, and not let go under any circumstances. So here I am, again, holding on for dear life, the very truest sense.

season shift, glimpsing the unseen

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I return to the theme of the season shift, which I am almost through, I think. Today was a treat day to a spa with friends – a rare event – but of course it meant soaking and cleansing in hot pools and bubble pools and terribly cold water pools, and scrubbing through (apparently) Japanese cleansing rituals and soaking weary feet.

I am more or less always on an inner alert for poetics and watery moments always evoke for me the feeling of baptism; death and birth. It is surprising how often in my life moments of transition coincide with moments of immersion.

The other women discussed lying on the sofa, which I could see was an eminently suitable choice for the weary restedness of a post-spa afternoon. But I felt alert, restless. I did not want to lie down indoors. Some kind of inner part of me is alive and suddenly feels renewed after a long trudge of weary tasks.

My being is vibrating and I am so relieved, as a kind of deadness kept threatening to take hold. I tried to reassure myself that this deadness was a mere effect of exhaustion, but I was afraid.

Returning home I didn’t know what to do. There are mountains of undone chores still, neglected as a result of too many work deadlines, too much travel. Food has run out, supplies have dwindled, friends languish unanswered.

Something deeper than a desire for progress overtook me, a calling, and, as it happens, into the still-furnished garden. One more day.

But where I sat yesterday looking back, today I sit in the present. I sit in the cleansed state of my spa self and feel the old things washed away, and me all new, fragile and yet available and alert. Available to new joys and pleasures, available to new adventures, available to deep wrestling and struggle, available to the future self of my being that is always drawing me forwards, through thick and thin, to her accomplishment.

The glimpse of the unseen is not a vision in the true sense; it is a sensation, a potency. It is where hope lies for the austerity of winter and the confusions of longings yet unfulfilled. It is a resonance of self that I inhabit when playing the piano, or listening to myself play; somehow this mood of self, this certain space, holds wonders for me; I can feel them, although I have no idea how to reach them, or how they will take form.

season shift – completion

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I’m here in the garden listening to the piano music I recorded while I was away on the business trip (at the airport, and you can hear the airport mini trucks beeping here and there, as well as airport hubbub and occasional announcements).

It’s the last day I will be able to sit like this in the garden this year. At the weekend the picnic tables and chairs and benches will be stored for the winter.

As so often happens, the moment itself is not as difficult as the anticipation of the moment.

The sun is shining, the wind is mild and the flowers and plants wave around me.

All that I have lived in this miraculous garden this summer is welling up within me. The sheer surprise of it, the gift of its unimaginable beauty, the joy of the comings and goings of other gardeners, the sweet events of afternoon teas, meditation with someone who might become special to me, birthday celebration with old friends and new neighbours, semi-adopting the sweet cats, picking, delighting in and sharing flowers, running here first after trips away, to check on my plants, to be home.

Sometimes life is difficult but sometimes grace effuses itself from who knows where and overwhelms the pains with its unexpected, astonishing beauty.

Such has been this garden to me in a quite wild summer, inside me, around me, and beyond me in the world which sometimes feels like it is collapsing under the weight of its own pains, its own lostness.

At the start of the summer I pondered whether the rhythm of this garden would help me restore ‘the studio inside’. It has. It has been the most exquisite open-air studio anyone could wish for. Now it is going to be allowed to rest while already I have been provided with a ‘real’ indoor studio. What grace again.

The music is ending, but, in a way I love so much, it ends on a note of incompleteness, an interrupted cadence, a kind of resolution with expansion in prospect, a generosity to what will come next…

return to the studio

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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.

the studio inside – rhythm

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All the while of la vie suspendue en l’air and la vie revenue à terre, I have been maintaining, more or less, my studio rhythm – piano, writing, documentation. So then something is going on in the studio inside, but to me, there is a kind of absence. An absence of expression. There is something about painting in particular that releases me into some kind of inner depth, while, mysteriously, materialising this depth into a visible form.

Is something preventing me from getting there?

Sometimes I just need to insist.

But as I write a recognise, yes, I’ve been doing immense works. Inner ones, in most cases, but also material ones of another sort – organising, unpacking, tending.

Perhaps now is time to try another intensity of insistence. Maybe I have a week before I leave for traveling to insist this into reality, to come home to water and colour, and to see what I find there…