transformation

season shift III

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When I subtitled this blog ‘discovering more beauty through writing’, I had no idea of the truth of how much I really would find a kind of goodness through the act of expressing deep things… I am home from a business trip and as usual, I lost myself a little in the intensity of it. I had a wonderful weekend with old friends, and yet, as with all reconnections after the wildness of the last years, there was an immense confrontation even in the gentle rhythms of Parisian life in the suburbs. We are older, we are scarred by the experiences of isolation, some dreams have not materialised. Yet. So there was delight and there was darkness and I did not have time to comprehend the dance of those experiences.

Then I arrived home into the season shift I had left, and of course the season had crept along without me. Trees are shedding leaves, the sunshine, though beautiful is weaker, the weather forecast predicts days of thick cloud.

And yet, writing. It is a miracle, a way through, the lit path. I sit down and see what I have written, and in it, rediscover who I am. The thread of the writing illuminates hope, is a kind of hope.

It is endlessly mysterious to me and it is wondrous.

I can feel old things disintegrating around me, and in the words I perceive the already-present buds of the new.

season shift

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Here in northern Europe there is an undeniable season shift.

I am not always good in seasonal transitions. Sometimes I drag my heels, severely reluctant to embrace something new, even spring. Perhaps especially spring with its vulnerability and newnesses.

A few weeks ago I went though an episode of not-enough-summer panic. This happens to me when the sunny days of summer have not amounted to enough to banish the severity of winter from my being, something that is more pressing when winters cling on into April and even May. This year it was more ferocious because of working relentlessly in June, so that my actual summer felt like it did not start til mid-July whereupon it coincided with wild winds and tempestuous days and finding myself ill in the only sunny ones.

Anyhow, as is the way of things, the panic turned out to be completely unfounded because I recovered to find myself tipped into a month of seeming endless sunshine, festivals, picnics, swimming and holiday. I am replenished in deep places and have a moment to contemplate autumn.

Somehow my replenishment seems to be contested. It really is there, I am certain, but doubts seem to circle around. I want to give myself over to autumn, to the thrills small – new stationery, new fashions redolent of school uniform – and large – wild projects, startling insights, new initiatives.

I am finding my way into the right position to surf the wave of autumn. My ambitions feel like they wildly outstrip the meagreness of chronological time, a perennial dilemma. But, as I tell myself, it is all in the positioning. So I write my way into this approach and that, testing things.

I want to embrace and delight in this season from the deep contentment, from a peaceful inner order. It feels like a kind of maturity and a sign of my own new inner harmony.

So I have been clearing some spaces and taking care of things and not letting new projects run away with themselves, but serve the older yet equally important places of consolidation and honouring existing commitments.

And writing my way into the right inner posture, taming myself.

childhood piano

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child
sitting there, legs dangling
enthralled, wondering
playing notes as
precisely, intentionally as a
Phd researcher,
though four years old

girl
sitting there, music room
stuffy, piano teacher
aside, seeing notes
black marks on black lines
pure

girl, still, though older
sitting there, wishing
her father was not so emphatic
my daughter could play that piano,
a contortion, playing
another person’s tune

teenager
sitting there,
aplomb, the one who can
accompany the orchestra
glory, approval,
satisfaction

young woman
sitting there, university
practice room, ‘perhaps you
can teach me?’ – she fails to recognise
an offer of intimacy,
and why should she?
she is absorbed

twenties
long absence, no room
in the small spaces, none
in time either

thirty-something
sitting there, new home
space, although it’s squeezed up to the sofa
new teacher,
horror at performing,
at persistent error,
inepitude,
shaking with it

forties
sitting there, new home
old piano abandoned to old existence
yet grace, magic
though borrowed, a queen’s instrument
peace, beauty, renovation, reunion
soul.

blows and beauty

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I was radiant with hope
delighting in the beauty
the truth, luminous over
my being, my story.

Blows rained down,
as if a cudgel to the heart
yet mere words.

You took my fears
as a script, copied
the old patterns
I thought I had, perhaps
eluded.

You crushed all joy from me
dismissing that it once
was shared, that depth,
the wonder of a true
communion.

Or was it? Certainty you
sowed with doubt, did you?
were you? how could you?
To our dreaming together you said,
no, alone.

An uncanny insistence
growls irritable from deep within me.
Trust your heart; your
own wisdom is truth.
Believe yourself.

What do I say to you now?
Can I undo myself from the
places you have
conveniently assigned for me
not to cause disturbance
not to trouble your
nice new story?
to elude the work
of making ground?

Can I heal from the idol
jailer of your own captivity?

My battle now is yours,
unfought.

I am not ruled by
convenience or comfort.
I seek truth.
Your blows have momentarily discouraged me
My wounds will heal
A mere skirmish, I will announce,
My laughter will return.
I will dance again.

I have lived this story before,
perhaps, yes,
some may say
but now I’m wiser

I untwist the events from your grasp
evil prophet,
I laugh giddy at my freedom, my knowing
this time the story will belong to beauty.

return to the studio

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I have spent the summer tending ‘the studio inside’ after my one week residency in June. The communal garden has been a studio. And my neighbours’ apartment with their piano. But the days are getting colder and soon the neighbours will return to inhabit their city home full time.

I returned from holiday and two absences stared me sternly in the face. Indisputable and unmoveable. One was the absence of a studio.

I am a very joyful person and quite good at smoothing over bumps and being grateful where gratitude can reside, but somehow the absence of a studio is very stern, and immune to substitutions or platitudinous comfort. There is a joy in a studio which literally nothing can replace. This is a mystery to me. I’m somewhat reluctant to concede this ground.

But maybe starkly facing our absences has an importance? So I pondered to myself.

Into this absence I said a fierce prayer. If your commitment to existence is not to control your longings nor to detach from them, both of which constitute a harsh diminishment of human being, and if you refuse to despair, a fierce prayer is mostly what is left. I leave the deeper questions for another time, but in this case I was astonished to find, shortly thereafter, I was sitting in a studio again. A temporary arrangement, but astonishing nonetheless.

I reviewed the writing I did here at the start of the summer. I pondered the renovation of ‘the studio insight’ and now reflecting, this is indeed what has happened. Through piano, plants, play, seaside, parties, festivals and dancing, many of the old broken places have been substantially mended.

The day I heard I would have a studio, a project took shape in my being. Since that day, a series of disruptions have overwhelmed my daily life. This is a recognisable and now almost encouraging pattern showing that I am on to something.

This does mean however that some of the renovating got trashed so now I am attending to that.

But there is a deep thrill in the heart of the project, and its existence cannot be prevented.