unknown

beautiful interlude

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It’s extremely beautiful in the garden today.

My life in this country has been fraught with existential friction. I was going to write difficulty and then I thought of the true difficulties of others who are trying to settle in an unknown land and I felt hesitant about attributing the same word to my own feelings of struggle, fear, loss, intimidation, and weariness.

Yet mysteriously, however harsh the feeling of – for me – difficulty has been in any given season, there has been a place of extreme beauty alongside me.

For a while it was the botanical gardens, or the balcony. Now it is this beautiful tiny communal garden where I found myself literally transported while needing a home and where I knew the moment I stepped into it that I would live. Not literally, fortunately – I discovered an apartment nearby – but almost.

Today the woodchips of the smaller paths have been replaced. I am not in the group responsible for paths so it’s as if a path angel has worked overnight. And this in addition to the sheer affectionate indulgence of all my flowers growing for me, flourishing, scenting, and my tiny wild strawberries, spontaneous and delicious, and someone else’s beautiful grey cat, who runs along to greet me and occasionally be stroked as long as I demonstrate no interest whatsoever.

Without these places of beauty, as if gifts from a divine hand, I would never have been able to sustain the adventure of this existence. Yet with this wild unfathomable joy, I am able to reach places I never would have believed, to dig into substance in myself, in the world, to pose stark questions and sometimes insist that they be answered, and to stretch myself fully to the far extent of my capacity and to see what happens when I try it, to elude or conquer intimidation, fear, dread, despair, the giants always set at odds with the expression of a deep and true self.

One day, I hope, this will all have more meaning, but for now, the meaning is that I am doing something true, and when it is very very difficult, I am soaked, drenched in beauty, and become healed and able to try again, to keep going, to give.

reality

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Yesterday I collided with two deep forms of reality (amongst the swooshings of everything around me). Firstly, I felt lost. Writing this down in the middle of the day made me somewhat comically feel immediately found. Secondly I wanted to rest, but it was not the moment to rest. This did not have quite the same impact but it softened the fretfulness that I was experiencing between my longing to collapse and not being able to.

Earlier this summer I found myself staring at two stark truths; unavoidable and uncontrollable they were. Two things I long for but cannot simply procure.

There is something about deep reality (I make a distinction between that and the confusions of everyday life, a kind of reality of their own, but often too entangled with delusions to easily pick out the truth from the fictions) which is mysteriously comforting, even when unwelcome. It is freeing in a certain kind of sense because it will not suffer manipulation and is immune to control-strategies.

I am not sure exactly what I am doing with this insight, but in a way I somehow stay close to it, and it is strengthening me for the demands of the moment.

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.

edge, rim, shore

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I’m teetering
again
on the rim
or edge
threshold,
shore.
I’m not quite

a lure
a calling,
I’m being,
no, not forced
invited
drawn

All at once
the future
arrives to me
here
in this moment
now
shall I?

Will I?

Joy jostles
wildly
with my
wildest fears,
wild dreams
wilder than I know
can possibly know
bewildered
oh afraid oh
enticed oh
enraptured
oh, shall I?
do this
step off into
an unknown future
with you?

will you catch me?
will you?

I’m coming

Note: This poem continues the series of piano painting poems inspired by the music of Ludvico Einaudi’s Divenire, played by myself on the grand piano of my downstairs neighbours. Unlike the other poems in the series it was created before the painting, and was a path into the courage to face a new blank page and enter into the vulnerability of creating in the unknown.

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.