the studio inside

The week long residency in the heavenly studio came to an end. I cleaned, tidied and locked up.

I went to the Watercolour Museum on a pilgrimage and I was too tired to relish it (although I had enough energy to be annoyed by patriarchal posturing and no women’s voices.)

I came home wondering:

What next?

My weekend has been full of sweet social moments, a hiatus of grace.

But something in me is alive. How do I make space to create, what should be the rhythm, what happens in the hush. I have business work to do, but a distaste for harshness and discipline, which in my studio week, I escaped.

At the end of the week I was so tired I felt like perhaps the one week’s output had been enough for a whole summer.

But it hadn’t.

There is something in me and its precious and needs to be tended.

Yes, there are canyons of chores awaiting my attention, but there is something more… an insistence.

And a thought occurs to me:

Maybe the time in the studio was renovating

the studio inside?

rim

I am teetering on the rim of hell.
Can you feel it too?
A certain kind of danger.
A lure.
A vat of swirling hate; all the discouragements of my life
kept
Waiting, rotting, writhing.
Clamouring.
L’appel du vide.

I am teetering and it will take only the most
infinitessimal inner shift to fall,
I gasp.
Precarious in my very breathing, existing fraught with
concentration.

It’s calling to me now, I hear you,
‘Oh poor you’, ‘no change’, ‘it always fails’, ‘what a
pitiful and lonely unreality; you continue to delude yourself’.
Perhaps you are what is most true?

Hell, I tell myself.
I WILL NOT GO IN THERE.
I will not keep company with dread, defeat and deep
disillusion.

My story will be different.
Only I can make it from another thread.
Those voices lie.

I am teetering on the rim of hell.
And I will not fall in there.
I steady myself.