light

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.

light

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There is something so light in this week in the studio. Perhaps it’s because of that, that it is only a week, even though I long for something more permanent.

I am accustomed to large-scale, intense, no-end-in-sight-for-months-or-years projects. I have deeply integrated the virtue of difficulty, its capacity to draw out a wildness, a unique depth of self that is rare and to be treasured in our how-long-can-I-distract-your-attention-from-anything-important world.

And then here I am, tumbling into this week, breathless and weary from my other work (in business, since you ask) and I find myself in something so sweet and beautiful and light. I somehow feel no pressure. I have elegantly disembarked from my responsibilities. I had no time to weight the week with intentions. I am existing, pure and free.

It’s such a pleasure and so unusual as a grown woman to encounter such an interlude. And it has, I must admit, taken some diligence and hope to protect it.

But I wander about, peaceful, playing, and I can feel a luminous uncanny that I have not sensed for a long time, magnifying within me.

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?

poem by the light switch

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(For Ruth)

Water is taught by
click – on
thirst; Land 
wipe off grubby finger mark
click – off
by the oceans passed;
Transport, by the throe;
click – still off,
click, change bulb,
click – on
Peace, by 
‘What do you mean,
“what am I doing in there?”‘
its battles told.
Love, by memorial
click – off,
(distant) ‘I’m here now’
mould; Birds,
by the 
click – on
(forgot something)
‘oh look it’s…’
click – off
snow.

Note: This poem is an homage to my friend’s music teaching room where she had taped lines by Emily Dickinson to her wall, above the light switch. On investigation, the lines are from poem CXXXIII in the ‘Time and Eternity’ section in Collected Works (1924).

found poem – a stroll in Brussels, autumn 2015

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To our heroes.

The unicorn doesn’t take the bus.
It flies from star to star.
Do the same.
Love life.  And smile.

On May 14th 2009, a young sequoia
from the family garden
dead from an unknown disease
is cut down.

May it please the One who Is to
open the human heart to the
full measure of all life.

A thunderous landing
manifests its weight for a final time
as it falls
prostrate.

To enter into the unknown
involves a willingness
to fully experience and study things we don’t understand
and to embrace that lack of understanding.

I have a dream.
Restoration of networks
of energy and public illumination.

Do you?

Sources:  War memorial near Les Etangs d’Ixelles; sign on lamp-post near Ixelles; description, Royal Museum of Fine Arts; engraving, Marguerite Yourcenar Park; book in museum gift shop; advertisement; street sign; advertisement.

All translations mine.