transformation

defiance

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Things are getting more intense…

Sometimes it’s hard to know if the feeling of intensity are merely the effect of personal failings: Is it really circumstances that are so difficult or it is my own immature refusal to accept things as they are?

I’ve had another day of frustrations. Some things have been good but it’s wearying to find that in yet another day my places of replenishment have somehow been turbulenced and tangled.

I’m squiggling around wondering whether to give up on my beautiful hopes, if my relentless insistence on believing in the beautiful, the good, in the unfolding in certain places of something different to what has gone before, is itself the problem.

Or am I squiggling with that or just with the part of myself that is severely reluctant and unable to be dissolved by chaos? It is so utterly astonishing to me what people talk themselves into settling for.

Or am I meant to surrender? An act of humility?

The things is this: I am not seemingly called to make up abstract theories and self-hypnotising stories about why this or that has not happened, will never happen. I’m called to persevere into things that have not been seen before. And that in this world, things are needed that no-one has seen before. Or perhaps things that have been seen before, but that need to be resurrected for the current age.

I’m getting nearer to a point of breakthrough, a rip in the fabric of existence (my own at least, and since my life is part of existence, I call it ‘existence’ plain and simple). This, I’m afraid to say, almost always coincides with situations becoming more impossible. Why is this? I don’t know, but I’ve seen it before. In such circumstances, persistence in itself becomes miraculous long before whatever is being sought arrives.

A note to myself: don’t fall into self-pity. This bit is always rife with traps. Your lovely friends let you down; they didn’t realise that they were being sucked into the maelström that precedes the new. Forgive, forgive, forgive, keep going.

Something stronger, somehow than perseverance: Defiance. Dis-trust of the visible in the pursuit of the unseen. Not relying on that in which security is commonly sought.

Believing in another reality, trusting that, letting it take the weight of risk, believing.

A week to go until the daring act. Stay with it; focus.

These are the things I tell myself.

an act of daring

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What has it all been about, this summer, this piano playing, this renewing of an inner studio?

At the end of a summer holiday in my home country, which contained an inner adventure, I found myself absolutely renewed, expanded, with the kind of glistening clarity I could barely have imagined possible. Derisory concerns and pettinesses of worry had cleared completely away, as if a whirlwind had gone through my life and left only the most beautiful things, hope.

I was effervescing with the delight of it and wild with the power of myself that had been as if launched within the exhilaration. I was ready for projects, expansions, longings, dreams…

And I returned home to endless, continuous difficulty, disruption, demand, discouragement and dread.

Hmmm.

The last few weeks have consisted of repeated attempts to rediscover, retrieve, establish, rediscover, retrieve this substance of myself. I am accustomed to such dynamics but rarely have they been so ferocious. The other day I was despairing with my friend about the endlessness of it and when I saw her yesterday she had had a thought.

There is a situation I had not quite been addressing, something where the difficulty of the dynamics were risking inner collapse, compromise instead of conviction. It was easy to argue the validity of succumbing to the pressure. Any reasonable acquaintance would have commiserated with me and left it, disconsolate but rational.

My friend is not entirely convinced of the life-deciding legitimacy of what currently passes for reason.

This is what you need to do, she declared, and then outlined what felt like, in the circumstances, the most preposterous, vulnerable and socially unconventional way of relating to the circumstances.

And I knew she was right.

Suddenly I knew, this was what my summer was about: And this is how I will complete the work of it.

Now, alongside the sheer endlessness of the weariness, I feel a glimmer of excitement.

(And fear).

deplete, replenish

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In the struggle that is this perseverance to hold onto the self that is present in the piano playing, I find myself needfully sensitive to what enables and what undermines my ability to hold and extend this attitude.

It sometimes surprises me how much very small things can have a disproportionate power to boost or to drain. In these days of waking already a little on edge, my very ordinary morning rhythms have an almost mythic quality, so much do they stabilise me on waking. Likewise beautifully written texts, an autumn leaf in the sun, kindness whether to myself or witnessed to others, my favourite tea, perfectly brewed, candlelight.

Anything that jars me looms larger, as an enemy: a minor breakage, yet another lie ushered by a public figure, an angry voice, whether to myself or witnessed to another, not finding an outfit that expresses some highly precise inner feeling, taking longer than expected.

This sensitivity attracts old shame: ‘making a fuss’, ‘overdramatising’, ‘self-absorbed’. Yet it is an expression of something deeply mattering to me, of a kind of protectiveness of a treasure.

There is a high level of personal exposure in my life and artistic practice, modest as it is, in that I try to live very true to what is happening, not numbing myself with the usual hiding places. I can see from old seasons and many acquaintances, that much of life is often lived muffled, a blur. It is easy to lose oneself in Responsibilities, Children, Scrolling and Series.

The tools of my work are the very sensitivity I am protecting, to joy, fear, nuance, significance, tone, mood, gesture and language. And beauty, love, tenderness, mystery and grace.

It is good to remind myself, to strengthen up that I have chosen what I am doing and living, and I embrace the entirety of that choice.

Then also it is only wisdom to address the depletions and accentuate the replenishments, looking out for them as I live the day.

In the studio – new space

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Indeed the garden studio season has ended and mercifully I do have a studio space. It’s one I’ve not inhabited before which makes various kinds of particular dynamics in the use of the space. Surprisingly, it has a piano in it, although an electric one so not suitable for playing (not for me!) but it has a symbolic power which is encouraging given that my attempts to continue my playing are currently being thwarted.

I have a lot business work and so the studio does not quite have the purity of moments when I can focus solely on creativity. I am navigating and negotiating through my days, working out where the pockets of insistence should be, and where I must gracefully embrace the demands of the moment.

Being thwarted from playing the piano means that I am continually losing the the thread of some self that I have cultivated in the summer. When I have lost her I wake up feeling on edge. This self is seemingly under threat and I am doing everything in my power to protect her existence but it is arduous work and seemingly meeting with continual opposing forces. This is almost certainly not my imagination; I have been here before and it is what happens when I am near something important in the fabric of existence.

Somehow writing here tremendously helps me find and hold on to the thread, and not let go under any circumstances. So here I am, again, holding on for dear life, the very truest sense.

season shift, glimpsing the unseen

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I return to the theme of the season shift, which I am almost through, I think. Today was a treat day to a spa with friends – a rare event – but of course it meant soaking and cleansing in hot pools and bubble pools and terribly cold water pools, and scrubbing through (apparently) Japanese cleansing rituals and soaking weary feet.

I am more or less always on an inner alert for poetics and watery moments always evoke for me the feeling of baptism; death and birth. It is surprising how often in my life moments of transition coincide with moments of immersion.

The other women discussed lying on the sofa, which I could see was an eminently suitable choice for the weary restedness of a post-spa afternoon. But I felt alert, restless. I did not want to lie down indoors. Some kind of inner part of me is alive and suddenly feels renewed after a long trudge of weary tasks.

My being is vibrating and I am so relieved, as a kind of deadness kept threatening to take hold. I tried to reassure myself that this deadness was a mere effect of exhaustion, but I was afraid.

Returning home I didn’t know what to do. There are mountains of undone chores still, neglected as a result of too many work deadlines, too much travel. Food has run out, supplies have dwindled, friends languish unanswered.

Something deeper than a desire for progress overtook me, a calling, and, as it happens, into the still-furnished garden. One more day.

But where I sat yesterday looking back, today I sit in the present. I sit in the cleansed state of my spa self and feel the old things washed away, and me all new, fragile and yet available and alert. Available to new joys and pleasures, available to new adventures, available to deep wrestling and struggle, available to the future self of my being that is always drawing me forwards, through thick and thin, to her accomplishment.

The glimpse of the unseen is not a vision in the true sense; it is a sensation, a potency. It is where hope lies for the austerity of winter and the confusions of longings yet unfulfilled. It is a resonance of self that I inhabit when playing the piano, or listening to myself play; somehow this mood of self, this certain space, holds wonders for me; I can feel them, although I have no idea how to reach them, or how they will take form.