second summit day

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.

defiance

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.

blows and beauty

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.