transformation

mid-point

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Maybe I reached the mid-point.

All hell broke loose anyway. Trained as I am to look for symmetries in literature, I look for the same symmetries in the stories of my own life.

Often there is a turbulence around the most important point.

Something is trying to break in or out and something else is resisting it.

It’s exhausting and my own choices will be the flap of the butterfly’s wings that make completion or collapse.

Or at least my own choices are all that I can affect personally; destiny, other people, circumstances are not for me to decide.

In the middle of the turbulence I must summon everything within me to hold steady to what I know is most true, most full of hope, most kind.

If I hold steadier than the resistance presses on me, the depth of something else will break through.

I will be past the mid-point.

I still may not know what the something else is until much later.

The turbulence will persist for some days.

pool of dawn

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swimming,
pool of dawn
splashes of spark ignite me
hope fire chills my bones
Did I dive in?
I don’t remember
I swim in dawn de cologne
it stings a little bit
too alive too now
everything dead is gasping
stranded if it will not
give it self up to life
being dawn-summoned it shrinks
enfeebled, inert,
dissipating in one hiss
warm radiance consoles
consoles the weary
fear not, fear not
wherever hope was not
it was
it is
it will have been
splash spray spray

storm

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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.

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…

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.