wonder

hush again

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

It’s very particular to do walk towards another summit so soon after the last one.

In a way I have rarely experienced, the thrill of joy from the first summit is making even the weary days towards the second one more delightful and with less doubt and will-I-make-it hesitation.

I somehow feel that it has been set up this way; that he joy of the first summit was designed all along to propel me to the second, perhaps more complex summit. Pause. Definitely more complex.

Today it’s sunny for the first time in over a week. It’s beautiful in the studio with the pink roses given by a friend dotted around, showing signs of love and support.

I’m waiting for the afternoon to tell me how to live it. Tomorrow is another big day, and it’s the last day in this studio, requiring also dismantling all my work and moving it all, before it will be truly completed.

There is a beautiful kind of hush in the room… it feels like the stillness before something extraordinary occurs.

Which it is.

edge, rim, shore

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

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 – completion

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

I’m here in the garden listening to the piano music I recorded while I was away on the business trip (at the airport, and you can hear the airport mini trucks beeping here and there, as well as airport hubbub and occasional announcements).

It’s the last day I will be able to sit like this in the garden this year. At the weekend the picnic tables and chairs and benches will be stored for the winter.

As so often happens, the moment itself is not as difficult as the anticipation of the moment.

The sun is shining, the wind is mild and the flowers and plants wave around me.

All that I have lived in this miraculous garden this summer is welling up within me. The sheer surprise of it, the gift of its unimaginable beauty, the joy of the comings and goings of other gardeners, the sweet events of afternoon teas, meditation with someone who might become special to me, birthday celebration with old friends and new neighbours, semi-adopting the sweet cats, picking, delighting in and sharing flowers, running here first after trips away, to check on my plants, to be home.

Sometimes life is difficult but sometimes grace effuses itself from who knows where and overwhelms the pains with its unexpected, astonishing beauty.

Such has been this garden to me in a quite wild summer, inside me, around me, and beyond me in the world which sometimes feels like it is collapsing under the weight of its own pains, its own lostness.

At the start of the summer I pondered whether the rhythm of this garden would help me restore ‘the studio inside’. It has. It has been the most exquisite open-air studio anyone could wish for. Now it is going to be allowed to rest while already I have been provided with a ‘real’ indoor studio. What grace again.

The music is ending, but, in a way I love so much, it ends on a note of incompleteness, an interrupted cadence, a kind of resolution with expansion in prospect, a generosity to what will come next…

season shift III

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

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 II

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

Finding the right position for the season shift is ongoing. This week has been somewhat severe in its insistence on change. The neighbours have returned to their apartment and I can no longer play the piano in the mornings. This week turned extremely cold with blustery rain, making my garden writing starts impossible. I have client projects beginning which take up substantial space in the week’s schedules, and I am wondering where to place and how to find time for the delicacy and sensitivity of writing, pondering, persisting, discovering. I had to retrieve various jumpers, tights and coats from the attic and the light garments of summer are soon to be banished to make space for them. Somehow these things also coincided with the unexpected completion of a writing project that has been going on for three years. Another one is starting but the disappearance, all of a sudden, of the previous project’s routine was a shock.

As you can see I have not quite come to a contentment in and embrace of autumn.

And yet I do love autumn joys. What is it that is clinging on inside me? An unspoken disappointment? Fear? A kind of seasonal abandonment making me feel bereft?

I’m being invited to surrender and I don’t want to. The season to come is going to be more demanding than the season I am leaving. It’s a fact.

Is it a fact?

As I write I peer into winter’s darkness I can see it as if lit up with a path of candlelight. This image of light is all the more striking this year as one of the themes of my work and life has been disruption over lighting. I will not go into it more here, but the very perception of a path of lights entices me a little, stirring a desire that has been starkly absent, refusing to emerge.

Hmmm a lit path… lit as if guiding a path to a beautiful place, though at night.

Perhaps this is the invitation I need to find a way through.