unknown

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.

the studio inside – rhythm

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All the while of la vie suspendue en l’air and la vie revenue à terre, I have been maintaining, more or less, my studio rhythm – piano, writing, documentation. So then something is going on in the studio inside, but to me, there is a kind of absence. An absence of expression. There is something about painting in particular that releases me into some kind of inner depth, while, mysteriously, materialising this depth into a visible form.

Is something preventing me from getting there?

Sometimes I just need to insist.

But as I write a recognise, yes, I’ve been doing immense works. Inner ones, in most cases, but also material ones of another sort – organising, unpacking, tending.

Perhaps now is time to try another intensity of insistence. Maybe I have a week before I leave for traveling to insist this into reality, to come home to water and colour, and to see what I find there…

door way

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a door
you, who have come here
moved in, unlocking things
before I noticed,
What are you doing here?
Where did you find those keys?
and who told you where to find
those
locked up places?

Who are you to me?
Will you just unlock and leave?
leave all these rooms open?
for someone else to explore?
Are you a door yourself?
a key?
or a wide expanse of being, to discover?
a togetherness?

a depth?
a sea?


revenue à terre

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As suspected I’ve come back down to earth, an event somewhat hilariously marked by the very material and grounding purchase of a new sofa. Although, excitingly, one with more space for a new season.

The change of seasons is always a kind of strange moment. An old prophesy calls the listener to ‘enlarge the place of your tent’, exhorting ‘lengthen your cords, strengthen your stakes’. The image that always come to mind in this moment of a season shift is of the tent pegs disinterred, and the flaps of the tent flailing wildly in the air. Flailing, the perfect word for this kind of moment.

So now I’m not sure what the rhythm is. I’m aware that I have made progress in tending the studio inside, but I have not really inhabited it yet. I know this because I have not been painting, nor recently written a poem. Things are a bit flimsy.

There is no way to force this into a discovery, a moment, it’s a kind of waiting and that’s all there is to it. But in the meantime I take time to replenish all my stocks, feed my plants, shop for basics. I know that when the adventure arrives, I will be glad to be replenished.

la vie suspendue – interrompue

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Toujours là, kind of.

Yesterday in a pinnacle of irony I found myself panic-stricken that the very cough I’d previous resisted, denied, been in a bad mood with etc etc before I finally accepted that I was ill might be actually be nearly better.

Suddenly it was clear that I wasn’t ready. Whatever was being accomplished by the enforced quiet of being ill-ish (very different from actually ill) had not actually been accomplished yet. In a kind surely-this-only-happens-to-strange-me moment I found myself relieved when the cough reappeared. Relief. I was still protected by the circumstances from emerging back into whatever demands I associate with being well.

But there is a turbulence, nonetheless in this unfinished mid-air living. Last night a friend visited with a variety of provocative thoughts and imaginings about my situation, which despite being sweet and light, shook the depths of myself in places where, so it turned out, I had already settled into what might become a staleness. This morning the inhabitants of the piano apartment announced an imminent visit moments before I expected to play. And there is torrential rain so my beloved garden is out of bounds.

I lean in, listening to my own music, my own heart… what do I do with this, with this ruffling of the still depths, obstacles?

And I hear the answer, ‘deeper’, the kerfuffles of the small disturbances can be allowed to herd me into deeper places, deeper depths, the music of my own being. I elude the obstacles with a deeper intention.

The turbulence of suspendue en l’air, echoes the turbulence of the water. I let myself be carried; I swim deeper. These paradoxical realities do their work with me, within me, wildly. I am sky, I am sea.