summit

descent, ascending

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It’s a strange moment.

Part of me is in the descent from the double summit. The weariness, the picking my way down intricate paths, gravity, triumph reverberating in my body, a gathering of power. Also, an accumulation of neglected tasks.

Part of me is in new terrain already. I have the keys to a new piano. I have a new project profile. I have a beginning to make. Wonder.

I’m existing in the middle of these two realities and it’s dizzying.

Somehow I am in need of a stillness in which these two things coalesce in a new order and how me the way forward.

This is why I am writing.

It’s very hard to enter into a stillness in a summit descent or a beginning. Both energies are the antithesis of stillness. In descent, there is the hurry to get down, to find a place of rest, of safety from exposure and vulnerability. In ascent, there is the the need to start to accumulate rhythm, so that a new path can be forged by momentum and commitment.

Perhaps I will not get all the way down? Perhaps I will only get as far as a plateau where a new ascent will take hold?

This is not a comforting thought. I feel a longing for rest.

It is a fact that rest is not entirely available in the present circumstances. Aside from the descent and ascent of creative work, there are endless chores and tasks requiring immediate attention, already showing signs of the neglect they have suffered.

I don’t yet have a clear picture.

Until I do I am picking my way along with care…

a rip in the fabric of reality

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I made it to the second summit.

The second summit was, you may recall, the daring act, a conversation with a friend.

It turned out to be very difficult to carry out, and strange.

First the day was very disrupted. I could not find the right thing to wear, the weather being milder than it looked, and the day holding multiple, contradictory-suitable-outfit events. I managed to leave the house to find that the logistics of the day were totally different to that which I had imagined. I could not conceive of how I would be able to do everything that I was responsible for doing and still carry out the daring act. But I must carry it out, of that I was certain. Also, it was classic that circumstances were seemingly to conspire yet again to obstruct the accomplishment of anything remotely important to me.

Breathe in, breathe out; it’s wild near the summit. This is what I told myself.

And this was indeed the precisely correct approach because the circumstances tamed themselves down into a harmony almost poetic in its perfection.

But still, the daring act remained to be done.

The friend arrived, and to my shock, brought along another set of conspiring circumstances. I was totally shocked, having made clear, I was certain, of the need for some space. The slot I was now allocated was almost offensive in its brevity.

As I took in the new reality, I pondered, do I even go ahead now? Could what I had to do even be carried out in such unprepossessing conditions?

Suddenly total conviction took hold of me. It was the day of the summit; who knew when I would get another attempt.

I completed my daring act of sharing in twenty five minutes. My friend looked utterly startled.

And rushed off to the next item on the days agenda.

But the daring act had been accomplished, and perhaps all the more emphatically for the intensity of the conditions.

Now: descent. Something that also needs care.

I also have keys to a new borrowed piano.

second summit day

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It’s the second summit. I am excited but after yesterday’s stillness today has been caught up in chaos – I can feel the wild conditions outside, and in myself.

It’s proving challenging to hold steady and go calmly along. I wonder if I will remember everything important. I need to make another list.

If I have a chance I will look back over the old ground to see how far I have come, and to strengthen. I need to revise the terrain also.

It’s hard to keep repositioning in the shifts. I am tired from being brave and tired from uncertainty. I also have the practical work to do of carrying everything from one studio to another.

Courage! I will make it. My list will help (!) and my friends and my visions.

and faith.

hush again

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It’s very particular to do walk towards another summit so soon after the last one.

In a way I have rarely experienced, the thrill of joy from the first summit is making even the weary days towards the second one more delightful and with less doubt and will-I-make-it hesitation.

I somehow feel that it has been set up this way; that he joy of the first summit was designed all along to propel me to the second, perhaps more complex summit. Pause. Definitely more complex.

Today it’s sunny for the first time in over a week. It’s beautiful in the studio with the pink roses given by a friend dotted around, showing signs of love and support.

I’m waiting for the afternoon to tell me how to live it. Tomorrow is another big day, and it’s the last day in this studio, requiring also dismantling all my work and moving it all, before it will be truly completed.

There is a beautiful kind of hush in the room… it feels like the stillness before something extraordinary occurs.

Which it is.

double summit

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Yes, I am existing in the thrill of yesterday’s summit triumph.

It is rare in life to be able to revel in the joy of a coming victory without doubts as to whether it may occur, but I had the most luminous day preparing my work to be shown. Then, as it turns out, many many visitors came to see the summer’s work in the open studio; the first time this has ever happened to me. I was dazzled and dizzy with the sheer wondrousness of the warmth, joy and interest of the visitors, a delight it had never even occured to me to dream of in my old existence.

Yet the day held a slight surprise: a double summit.

It was like this: the day was scheduled with a friend also visiting, during which visit I was planning a daring act. But the friend came impossibly late for such a conversation. While I might have expected to be disappointed, it turned out that I had needed the whole day to prepare for the evening event and it would have been terribly compromising to it to curtail the getting ready work. While I might have expected to feel bereft, it turned out that the friend would be able to visit for the act of great daring on Monday.

All in all the dynamics felt like those of grace, but it does mean that the work of this weekend is not entirely completed. One summit has been surmounted, but what I had not grasped is that there were two summits all along, and the second is spaced from the first by two days of travel.

So although today is a moment of respite, it is not a moment of descent. Attention and focus need to be retained, along with the dynamics of trust, hope and grace.

It is bravery of another kind, and another call to patience. But I have the delight of the first triumph to sustain me along the way, what joy.