summer

season shift – completion

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I’m here in the garden listening to the piano music I recorded while I was away on the business trip (at the airport, and you can hear the airport mini trucks beeping here and there, as well as airport hubbub and occasional announcements).

It’s the last day I will be able to sit like this in the garden this year. At the weekend the picnic tables and chairs and benches will be stored for the winter.

As so often happens, the moment itself is not as difficult as the anticipation of the moment.

The sun is shining, the wind is mild and the flowers and plants wave around me.

All that I have lived in this miraculous garden this summer is welling up within me. The sheer surprise of it, the gift of its unimaginable beauty, the joy of the comings and goings of other gardeners, the sweet events of afternoon teas, meditation with someone who might become special to me, birthday celebration with old friends and new neighbours, semi-adopting the sweet cats, picking, delighting in and sharing flowers, running here first after trips away, to check on my plants, to be home.

Sometimes life is difficult but sometimes grace effuses itself from who knows where and overwhelms the pains with its unexpected, astonishing beauty.

Such has been this garden to me in a quite wild summer, inside me, around me, and beyond me in the world which sometimes feels like it is collapsing under the weight of its own pains, its own lostness.

At the start of the summer I pondered whether the rhythm of this garden would help me restore ‘the studio inside’. It has. It has been the most exquisite open-air studio anyone could wish for. Now it is going to be allowed to rest while already I have been provided with a ‘real’ indoor studio. What grace again.

The music is ending, but, in a way I love so much, it ends on a note of incompleteness, an interrupted cadence, a kind of resolution with expansion in prospect, a generosity to what will come next…

season shift II

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Finding the right position for the season shift is ongoing. This week has been somewhat severe in its insistence on change. The neighbours have returned to their apartment and I can no longer play the piano in the mornings. This week turned extremely cold with blustery rain, making my garden writing starts impossible. I have client projects beginning which take up substantial space in the week’s schedules, and I am wondering where to place and how to find time for the delicacy and sensitivity of writing, pondering, persisting, discovering. I had to retrieve various jumpers, tights and coats from the attic and the light garments of summer are soon to be banished to make space for them. Somehow these things also coincided with the unexpected completion of a writing project that has been going on for three years. Another one is starting but the disappearance, all of a sudden, of the previous project’s routine was a shock.

As you can see I have not quite come to a contentment in and embrace of autumn.

And yet I do love autumn joys. What is it that is clinging on inside me? An unspoken disappointment? Fear? A kind of seasonal abandonment making me feel bereft?

I’m being invited to surrender and I don’t want to. The season to come is going to be more demanding than the season I am leaving. It’s a fact.

Is it a fact?

As I write I peer into winter’s darkness I can see it as if lit up with a path of candlelight. This image of light is all the more striking this year as one of the themes of my work and life has been disruption over lighting. I will not go into it more here, but the very perception of a path of lights entices me a little, stirring a desire that has been starkly absent, refusing to emerge.

Hmmm a lit path… lit as if guiding a path to a beautiful place, though at night.

Perhaps this is the invitation I need to find a way through.

breath, breathless

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stumble through the doorway
running, it seems I was
though now the old reality
seems distant, though yesterday

catch a breath
a gasp slow motion
exhalation, panic,
gulp another moment
sigh, disordered in
my being,
restless still

racing rat, fraught
thought, fought,
forlåt, what was that?
a tale, though how
you chased it

welcome
you are my guest
arrive, draw in deep,
what’s mine is yours
inhale hopefuless and wonder

my sighs pursue me,
echo the space alarmed
what happened to you?
life

a sweetness as a breeze
rose, orange blossom, peony,
fresh rain on gentled grass
far seas

I am arriving
I am born alive

Note: This is from the studio series inspired by paintings in my studio. The later paintings were written to the tune Divenire by Ludvico Einaudi. I can no longer remember if this one was. This is painted in Rose Madder, Permanent Rose, Cadmium Yellow, Cadmium Orange (all Windsor and Newton Professional) and Light Gold (Rembrandt). In my work these specific orange and yellow paints are indicative of the presence of a kind of fire, an element of the warrior nature. This first painting is the only one to use the fire colours. As if the arrival in the studio was a last breath of fire before the inhale and exhale of a more tender and touching reality.

last pelargonium

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It was really quite white
when I found it,
the last pelargonium,
but I was on a budget
and it was reduced
so I bought it
although really I wanted a pink one.

It’s a ‘mårbacke’, said the florist.
It’s a traditional kind.
But it was white
so I doubted.
Do you know the place?
I didn’t.
It is the home of a famous writer,
Selma Lagerlöf.
A current barely stirred.

And anyway,
I was on a budget
so I bought it
although it wasn’t pink,
but white.

I stood my white pelargonium
in a mixing bowl.
I didn’t own a plant pot
and was on a budget.
A mixing bowl was all I had.

It stood, a little self-conscious
on my step.  Two flowers giving me
joy, but white, and no others
arrived to join them.

I looked up Lagerlöf:
A woman writer
native to this land,
winning prizes,
when women didn’t.

I wished my plant was pink.

I went away for work,
asked an almost-neighbour
to water my pelargonium.
She took it in its mixing bowl,
didn’t comment.

A while later I returned,
settled in and eventually went
to retrieve the last pelargonium.
It has probably died, I told myself
to preempt disappointment.
The neighbour may not have been there
all the time.  It’s been hot.

I wandered up the path,
curved around the corner.
I spied the last pelargonium
covered in flowers.

They were pink.