perception

progress again

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One of the deepest joys of writing is to put into language tiny aspects of experience which rarely make it into words. It’s like this with my progress in these summer days. There is such quicksilver uncertainty if something is being made, what exactly?, anything?, and then suddenly there is a recognition, oh yes, there. There is something. It’s the flicker of an inner truth that a perspective has enlarged, that something hitherto hidden has revealed itself, that meaning has, even if almost imperceptibly deepened and strengthened, and most of all, its heralded by the unmistakeable presence of delight, an ancient barometer that is very rarely fooled, and often announces some wonder before the rest of perception has caught anywhere near up.

It’s been a quite peculiar few weeks of arduous struggle, in a friendship, digging deep, into self, into past selves, refreshing in drenched delights and pondering. And this is important: All along I have known that I was also being brewed. Tomorrow I set off for an adventure that I know will be confronting, beautiful, wild, difficult, vulnerable and tender. I am afraid and overjoyed.

And I am thankful for my own persevering in progress making, however uncertain, however unmeasurable, because now as I teeter on the brink of departure and arrival, I know that i have been equipped, and that quite soon I will really be Ready.

season shift III

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When I subtitled this blog ‘discovering more beauty through writing’, I had no idea of the truth of how much I really would find a kind of goodness through the act of expressing deep things… I am home from a business trip and as usual, I lost myself a little in the intensity of it. I had a wonderful weekend with old friends, and yet, as with all reconnections after the wildness of the last years, there was an immense confrontation even in the gentle rhythms of Parisian life in the suburbs. We are older, we are scarred by the experiences of isolation, some dreams have not materialised. Yet. So there was delight and there was darkness and I did not have time to comprehend the dance of those experiences.

Then I arrived home into the season shift I had left, and of course the season had crept along without me. Trees are shedding leaves, the sunshine, though beautiful is weaker, the weather forecast predicts days of thick cloud.

And yet, writing. It is a miracle, a way through, the lit path. I sit down and see what I have written, and in it, rediscover who I am. The thread of the writing illuminates hope, is a kind of hope.

It is endlessly mysterious to me and it is wondrous.

I can feel old things disintegrating around me, and in the words I perceive the already-present buds of the new.

loop

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Something is looping it seems to me. Here I am, after all, in this blog again, suddenly drawn to it, unexpectedly. What is there for me in my earlier self, I wonder. What is there for me in this representation of a me that you, by being there, sometimes liking, create? It’s mysterious.

I have a week in a space that completely transformed my life, over five months in the summer of 2020. Yes, that summer. Perhaps I will write more about it another time but I knew then and knew even more later, that a fundamental shift had taken place in my perception. Perception of the world, perception of self. I had joked that 2020 would be the year of seeing clearly. The joke had me.

So then here too is a loop.

And I find myself rereading the stories of my childhood.

I’m so much older that when I began this blog. I feel it. I can feel the resonances of greater substance, ontological weight, density, weariness, power. I have ‘made my bones’ but they are heavier to carry around, whereas surely there should be a more expansive freedom?

The true lightness of freedom, the true depth of well-formed substance. Another mystery.

So then there is this younger self. I recognise her and I feel triumphant. The self she was wondering was there is me. Her innocence touches me and I wonder if I can rediscover that. Surely that is a treasure? It is not-knowing and it is, I realise as I write this sentence, fear. I am at risk of an idealisation. It was terrible to be that vulnerable, continually not knowing if there was something there, risking everything with the possibility of nothing.

Something was there.

Perhaps though this is the rediscovery and the loop. That vulnerability recurs. The sight of an old tree in spring always touches me. All those frail sensitive quivering leaves on those full grown sturdy branches. It strikes me how rare it is to see those qualities in a person. Fragility is for the young, it seems, the full grown branches necessitate a kind of firmly-enforced self-protection.

I’m getting nearer some kind of reconnection and when I do I will know what it is. It will be a freedom and a lightness. It will be a reunion and an intensification, an expansion of substance.

And in the meantime, I will write this all to you, who carry the me I might become.