life

depths and trees

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It’s such a mysterious work of the depths.

Also when just now there is almost no one who sees me. Including here, I notice.

Yet in this mysterious strange quietude, shifts of substance are taking place.

In my teens I once wrote a poem about my essence having deserted me. It’s on my mind now.

I am going about my day, a little bit drifting, a luxury after so much structured work. Just now it’s also very stormy weather. I tumble into reveries, watching the trees. The branches so wild, the trunk so still. The branches terrifyingly wild, it sometimes seems. It’s a shock that they can be tethered to any stillness at all, but they are, and the tree trunks look immoveable.

They are comforting me. Though the wildness of my current living feels ferocious, somewhere, also true, is the peace of a truly established being, with roots which go all the way to the source of life, which carry sustenance and which enable growing and straining. I am taking up everything I need to grow, and I am not hollow and will not, despite my feelings, snap in two when it feels too much.

I won’t. So the trees reassure me.

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.

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.

spring, dry ground

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a time has passed, days
we are long acquainted, and yet
separate

desolate, oh desert,
dry of tears and dust of weeping
endless plains
pains

heat of long despair
nothingness of prayer

colonising silence
I struggle to give voice
to my love’s song

deep and full within me
bubbling, turbulent
sweetness, warm and cool
a rain stored centuries
for you, hope

a stirring,
yet prisoned

break through,
ancient hope of truth,
beauty and delight,
break through

silence, hard and fierce
refusal,
my love’s song,
discouraged
deepens

a stirring
yet prisoned

distillation of sweet days
flowers, birds and beauty
resdolent with meaning,
moments bathed in wonder
atoms dancing, molecules
in song,
renewal’s promise
eternal
a sea, a stream, a storm
a purity of force

suddenly a rushing
unbidden, a fierceness,
filtering a crack, sudden, sudden

silence

a spring
ancient spring
I effervesce my wealth
raucous with abandon
liquid laughter
embraces stale silence
to life
baptises austerity
bathes pains
flows, flows, flows

Note: this poem is a work in progress and, interestingly to me, encapsulates in its in-progress state the very tensions intended to be present in the image of the poem that came to me this morning. I hope to come back to this image and poem at point with greater completeness. But for now the very representations of my own inner state of fullness and frustration evident in the not-quite-working feeling (at least to me) of the poem are wryly comforting.

hovering, waiting, writing

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I’m here but not quite there. I can feel the jumble of myself, from working working working. The truths have got entangled. What I know I believe I can’t quite remember, can’t retrieve.

Yesterday an old thought stole into my pondering, as if it had dug its way out of the weary piles of tasks, remnants of the last months, and as if entered by another door, catching me off guard: ‘What if I lived as if the central truth of my romantic life is that I am living an epic love story? Preposterous, if the evidence is assessed, past disappointments lined up, absences annotated.

We are all living an exhaustion it seems, one we didn’t entirely see coming, because even the pessimists did not really predict it.

What if a greater beauty was still left? What if it was our choice of position that will unleash new hope. What if the story was wilder?

The thought had already made itself at home with startling nonchalance. Did I let it stay, or barricade it back out? If it stayed, it was going to require some rearrangements to the inner terrain, the inner furniture.

Do I let myself be vulnerable to hope (again)?

Suddenly, certain glimmering memories, surfaced, becoming fuel for dreaming.

And if I allow the preposterous to become the obvious, how do I then live?