self

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.

suspendue en l’air – gathering

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In the airy depth of suspendue en l’air living, a development has occured. Perhaps it was the intention towards depth that I harnessed in the turbulence of obstacles. Encountering this deep substance of self has given me a confidence and a question: Where next? And since I am often asking this question, I have tried, by sitting with it, to let it answer itself.

And yesterday it did. First it occured to me that having somehow been reunited with this luminosity of being, I should now collaborate in its strengthening, intensifying it but also clearing a space for it, gently. As I allowed these thoughts to order themselves, I pottered about, paying reverent attention to the ordinary: piano (listening), writing, lunch, and, as I am still a little ill, resting.

And then there it was: Reading an old-favourite work I heard the creak of an inner shift and I knew it was pulling me into the next movement of this strange summer: The boxes. Four years after emigrating I finally moved into an own home last autumn and the boxes housing my former life caught up with me. The work of sorting boxes is a particular kind of work, appearing practical but concealing endless emotional and spiritual work. It took a phenomenal organisation even to get them opened and arranged in the attic, and to deal with the wildness of the encounters with multiple former selves. At the point I had undone, unravelled everything, and placed things into their new positions, I landed into a work project that took all my time and energy for months. The unfinished work of tidying and sorting the boxes has been looming over me for months, totally inaccessible in terms of time, yet dauntingly apparent.

And so yesterday I started the work of arranging things into their new homes. Starting with the journals that I have kept since I first heard a boy liked me in senior school – ‘I am at an interesting time in my life…’ – and so yesterday this accumulation of substance took the form of setting my journal/selves in order, sometimes glimpsing a me here, a me there, in Paris, applying for a graduate job, commuting, wondering about some new love interest, off to a consulting project in Russia, praying.

And pondering how little those selves knew where I would be now, and wondering what it would have meant to know it, and now I sit again in the beautiful garden ‘a garden on a mountain is the human ideal’ so I learnt on a podcast yesterday about ancient scripture.

What does my life mean?

new terrain

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stumbling, almost certainly,
dazed and blinded by
new light
the exposure
vast expanse of space
foreboding
joy

steady myself
‘we’re here now’
tend to immediate needs
gentleness, cool water
supplies, details of
beauty

orientate
or fail to
unfamiliarity blurs
vistas to a mist

stay still stay still
come home to yourself
sense on high alert
senses
sensations
sense? sense
stillness reaps,
something moves beneath
the surface
knowing something
knowing nothing

still, longer
tend yourself
attend, wait, let it
grow substance with you
test it
strengthen beyond
an impulse to a
passion

presence of the giants
of fear
ancient guardians
fomenting fury
don’t let go
hold your position
sense
stay still, you are the giant here
let them run
let them hide

a certain
confidence of motion
trust a bedrock
we have been here before
never, often

straighten up, let
your burdens
stabilise your steps
move in

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.

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.