perseverance

defiance

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Things are getting more intense…

Sometimes it’s hard to know if the feeling of intensity are merely the effect of personal failings: Is it really circumstances that are so difficult or it is my own immature refusal to accept things as they are?

I’ve had another day of frustrations. Some things have been good but it’s wearying to find that in yet another day my places of replenishment have somehow been turbulenced and tangled.

I’m squiggling around wondering whether to give up on my beautiful hopes, if my relentless insistence on believing in the beautiful, the good, in the unfolding in certain places of something different to what has gone before, is itself the problem.

Or am I squiggling with that or just with the part of myself that is severely reluctant and unable to be dissolved by chaos? It is so utterly astonishing to me what people talk themselves into settling for.

Or am I meant to surrender? An act of humility?

The things is this: I am not seemingly called to make up abstract theories and self-hypnotising stories about why this or that has not happened, will never happen. I’m called to persevere into things that have not been seen before. And that in this world, things are needed that no-one has seen before. Or perhaps things that have been seen before, but that need to be resurrected for the current age.

I’m getting nearer to a point of breakthrough, a rip in the fabric of existence (my own at least, and since my life is part of existence, I call it ‘existence’ plain and simple). This, I’m afraid to say, almost always coincides with situations becoming more impossible. Why is this? I don’t know, but I’ve seen it before. In such circumstances, persistence in itself becomes miraculous long before whatever is being sought arrives.

A note to myself: don’t fall into self-pity. This bit is always rife with traps. Your lovely friends let you down; they didn’t realise that they were being sucked into the maelström that precedes the new. Forgive, forgive, forgive, keep going.

Something stronger, somehow than perseverance: Defiance. Dis-trust of the visible in the pursuit of the unseen. Not relying on that in which security is commonly sought.

Believing in another reality, trusting that, letting it take the weight of risk, believing.

A week to go until the daring act. Stay with it; focus.

These are the things I tell myself.

deplete, replenish

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In the struggle that is this perseverance to hold onto the self that is present in the piano playing, I find myself needfully sensitive to what enables and what undermines my ability to hold and extend this attitude.

It sometimes surprises me how much very small things can have a disproportionate power to boost or to drain. In these days of waking already a little on edge, my very ordinary morning rhythms have an almost mythic quality, so much do they stabilise me on waking. Likewise beautifully written texts, an autumn leaf in the sun, kindness whether to myself or witnessed to others, my favourite tea, perfectly brewed, candlelight.

Anything that jars me looms larger, as an enemy: a minor breakage, yet another lie ushered by a public figure, an angry voice, whether to myself or witnessed to another, not finding an outfit that expresses some highly precise inner feeling, taking longer than expected.

This sensitivity attracts old shame: ‘making a fuss’, ‘overdramatising’, ‘self-absorbed’. Yet it is an expression of something deeply mattering to me, of a kind of protectiveness of a treasure.

There is a high level of personal exposure in my life and artistic practice, modest as it is, in that I try to live very true to what is happening, not numbing myself with the usual hiding places. I can see from old seasons and many acquaintances, that much of life is often lived muffled, a blur. It is easy to lose oneself in Responsibilities, Children, Scrolling and Series.

The tools of my work are the very sensitivity I am protecting, to joy, fear, nuance, significance, tone, mood, gesture and language. And beauty, love, tenderness, mystery and grace.

It is good to remind myself, to strengthen up that I have chosen what I am doing and living, and I embrace the entirety of that choice.

Then also it is only wisdom to address the depletions and accentuate the replenishments, looking out for them as I live the day.

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.

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…

perseverance – suspendue en l’air – testing

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It’s the last morning, I think, of la vie suspendue en l’air. Several things that felt linked to this liminal space are shifting. I’m not really ill. The absent friend returns today. I have to take up some work next week. And some other things. This week I have almost entirely completed the gathering of the journals of my self, decades of self it is hard to believe. And they are all stacked there, in boxes, a kind of double of me, made out of paper, or a self portrait.

I’ve been having such a beautiful time, and then imperceptibly, I wasn’t. Was it my beautiful garden being disturbed by drunken chatter while I ate my lunch, or a sudden host of probably very sweet teenage boys, but in a posse that reminded me of the ancient vulnerability of womanhood. Was it things suddenly breaking and being hard to mend? Was it hearing the disappointment in a friend’s voice that I couldn’t be there for her? Or looking back over old photos for another friend’s hen party and being starkly confronted with certain losses? Or, finding that, after all my efforts, in fact two journals had been overlooked and they belonged to the least accessible boxes of heavy books, that what I thought I had triumphantly accomplished, I hadn’t?

All of them, of course, accumulating unseen, many trivial by their very nature, but poking at a vulnerable spot.

I woke in the same bed with the same view and the same life as all the other mornings, and instead of being filled with happiness, I was uncontestably sad.

So began, as usual, a little digging through the moments of the day, turning things over, pondering them, on the look out for a deeper significance to the turbulence, or if there wasn’t one, how to tame the circumstances back to towards a collaboration.

And I found something, whichever one it is, from my memories of similar times, similar patterns of being and becoming.

Often, on the brink of some completion, small or large obstacles appear. It is a fact of all the completions I have ever accomplished. And I used to fret about it, because a completion moment is by its nature vulnerable, and often accompanied by the intense weariness of a long perseverance.

But now I am wiser: What looks like fretful and often personal obstructions can conceal an important opportunity. The need for one final, conclusive effort to overcome the hindrances, to insist on the completion is what makes the work truly complete. It is what establishes the work and the substance, its power and its resilience.

So I look courage from the appearance of minor upsettling events, and summoned a deeper intention. The completion and I will prevail. The discouragements will not. The old thrill returned from somewhere buried. I am excited for what will happen next. Yes, and grown enough to announce that hope.