depths and trees

It’s such a mysterious work of the depths.

Also when just now there is almost no one who sees me. Including here, I notice.

Yet in this mysterious strange quietude, shifts of substance are taking place.

In my teens I once wrote a poem about my essence having deserted me. It’s on my mind now.

I am going about my day, a little bit drifting, a luxury after so much structured work. Just now it’s also very stormy weather. I tumble into reveries, watching the trees. The branches so wild, the trunk so still. The branches terrifyingly wild, it sometimes seems. It’s a shock that they can be tethered to any stillness at all, but they are, and the tree trunks look immoveable.

They are comforting me. Though the wildness of my current living feels ferocious, somewhere, also true, is the peace of a truly established being, with roots which go all the way to the source of life, which carry sustenance and which enable growing and straining. I am taking up everything I need to grow, and I am not hollow and will not, despite my feelings, snap in two when it feels too much.

I won’t. So the trees reassure me.

storm

Perhaps it was inevitable after the summit – a storm has caught me in the ambiguity between descent and ascent.

Yesterday multiple things went wrong. Mercifully they were not so serious but they included news of two hospital trips for family members, one left on crutches, blood tests awry, a rejection, a full connectivity breakdown over the areas where my studio is, mobile phone reception repeatedly breaking, delays thus with all my tasks and projects, dark menacing clouds all day, a colleague being taken out by a 24hour virus just when his presence might have been reassuring and calls of need and distress from dear friends.

This is the kind of thing I do expect after a feat of daring, but it was very tiring and today I am depleted.

It’s extremely hard to work also. It’s almost impossible to get into my creative project – literally at the moment the door is blocked and the piano is in use by someone else.

A few encouragements managed to sail past the murky dissuasion of the glooming clouds: encouragements from clients, from a community group, success of a friend.

I keep being caught between resting and regrouping. I long to collapse into a cosy-movie-watching oblivion but the undone chores loom over me, and deadlines. I can still feel the intensity of my bravery in my body, as if fizzing with power, and this makes it difficult to truly relax.

Keep walking calmly, I tell myself. To some extent this is working.

wild the sea; the spray, gold

storm, the wildness is coming
restless, I scent the rain
distant, but nearing
me, adrift, chop

currents crush me to
each other, press into my
skin, insistent
you are mine, Mine
I don’t belong to myself

forces pull on limbs
a vast rose crimson,
pulsing in the drench

clatter, rain advancing from
another shore, nearer still,
nearer, sound the drums of
torrents, clash against clash
whip, foam, soak, slap,
gasp, yet not a drowning
yet

monstrous pitterpat
hail, rain!
splatter
tumult a poor shelter,
lift me up, hide me
may I nestle in your ferocity

dip into the pinkish hue
silence a moment
down
returning,

surface
all is rose dawn
wild sea; rain-spray, gold

Note: a second poem in a series painted to Einaudi’s Divenire, played by myself after a long absence. This life size abstract water colour is painted in Rose Madder and Permanent Rose (Windsor and Newton Professional watercolour) splattered with Rembrandt Light Gold (Series III watercolour)