peace

reticence

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I went to the watercolour museum and, at the last minute, forgot my phone.

Hmm. Do I go back, arrive late?

Hmm. Will anyone miss me? Is it callous to disappear if someone might be worried?

On the tram I ask a stranger to borrow their device and smugly reproduce from memory the mobile number of my mother. Please can you text x and y so that they don’t worry.

(Later I heard that she’d glanced at the strange number and dismissed the message as a scam. <Delete>)

I was unexpectedly free.

We all know this. We’ve read the articles in newspapers, the lack of phone now noteworthy enough to represent paid-for content.

But it’s real, the freedom.

I caught a bus and was delivered both to the seaside, and to an earlier self, the one, perhaps, that traveled around Europe on a career break just in time to have witnessed those places before smart-phones, selfies and repeat-posing. In time to experience community with strangers in a way that would never exist again.

Well, that still did not exist.

Or to a deeper self, a more mysterious self, the self of summers and depth-of-winters and sweetness and the self that knows innocent things and yet has the wisdom of ancient and commonplace experience.

It was as if all my responsibilities had been left behind, both the real ones but also the symbolic ones in that device, and then the reticent self emerged and coalesced for a little while, and I didn’t dare think too much about it in case I lost her too suddenly.

We saw the exhibition. We ate lunch in the sun. We swam. We took photos of textures and time.

Then the end was coming and of course as I approached home, dozy with the sun and hum of a phone-less journey, she slipped away.

And I am left to ponder if there is any real-life-compatible way to appeal to her.

second summit day

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It’s the second summit. I am excited but after yesterday’s stillness today has been caught up in chaos – I can feel the wild conditions outside, and in myself.

It’s proving challenging to hold steady and go calmly along. I wonder if I will remember everything important. I need to make another list.

If I have a chance I will look back over the old ground to see how far I have come, and to strengthen. I need to revise the terrain also.

It’s hard to keep repositioning in the shifts. I am tired from being brave and tired from uncertainty. I also have the practical work to do of carrying everything from one studio to another.

Courage! I will make it. My list will help (!) and my friends and my visions.

and faith.

hush again

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It’s very particular to do walk towards another summit so soon after the last one.

In a way I have rarely experienced, the thrill of joy from the first summit is making even the weary days towards the second one more delightful and with less doubt and will-I-make-it hesitation.

I somehow feel that it has been set up this way; that he joy of the first summit was designed all along to propel me to the second, perhaps more complex summit. Pause. Definitely more complex.

Today it’s sunny for the first time in over a week. It’s beautiful in the studio with the pink roses given by a friend dotted around, showing signs of love and support.

I’m waiting for the afternoon to tell me how to live it. Tomorrow is another big day, and it’s the last day in this studio, requiring also dismantling all my work and moving it all, before it will be truly completed.

There is a beautiful kind of hush in the room… it feels like the stillness before something extraordinary occurs.

Which it is.

season shift

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Here in northern Europe there is an undeniable season shift.

I am not always good in seasonal transitions. Sometimes I drag my heels, severely reluctant to embrace something new, even spring. Perhaps especially spring with its vulnerability and newnesses.

A few weeks ago I went though an episode of not-enough-summer panic. This happens to me when the sunny days of summer have not amounted to enough to banish the severity of winter from my being, something that is more pressing when winters cling on into April and even May. This year it was more ferocious because of working relentlessly in June, so that my actual summer felt like it did not start til mid-July whereupon it coincided with wild winds and tempestuous days and finding myself ill in the only sunny ones.

Anyhow, as is the way of things, the panic turned out to be completely unfounded because I recovered to find myself tipped into a month of seeming endless sunshine, festivals, picnics, swimming and holiday. I am replenished in deep places and have a moment to contemplate autumn.

Somehow my replenishment seems to be contested. It really is there, I am certain, but doubts seem to circle around. I want to give myself over to autumn, to the thrills small – new stationery, new fashions redolent of school uniform – and large – wild projects, startling insights, new initiatives.

I am finding my way into the right position to surf the wave of autumn. My ambitions feel like they wildly outstrip the meagreness of chronological time, a perennial dilemma. But, as I tell myself, it is all in the positioning. So I write my way into this approach and that, testing things.

I want to embrace and delight in this season from the deep contentment, from a peaceful inner order. It feels like a kind of maturity and a sign of my own new inner harmony.

So I have been clearing some spaces and taking care of things and not letting new projects run away with themselves, but serve the older yet equally important places of consolidation and honouring existing commitments.

And writing my way into the right inner posture, taming myself.

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.