Tuesday 1 October 2013

time for a new story



I can't really get used to the fact that I am, at least most of the time now, living a new story. Sometimes I forget. A dark figure steps silently from the shadows, and I'm momentarily derailed again. Wandering in the desert, tearing at my hair, breathing hot winds.

I've been living for the last few years in this silent, interior landscape, with only the sound of my own tides for company. Trying to let my art come. Trying to get out of my own way. Preferring the idea of creativity to the idea of art, wanting music and movement and colour and texture and words to be together, to be dynamic, to be free. Holding on to the mast, determined never to let go again.

In the fantasy world of an artist that I made up at the beginning of my adult life, I was alone in a studio day after day, week after week. People were incidental, connection was irrelevant. Creativity was art, art was painting, painting was something that would possess me, soon enough. And it did not. And I waited.


...There were a few (of my friends) who seemed afraid of what was on offer, and... afraid of something it called for in their selves. As if they did not feel worthy of the invitation or felt at some essential level they were not equal to that world into which they were being invited. They had no belief in what they had encountered. What they glimpsed seemed too large for them and some part of them eventually became afraid of it. It might have been that they were afraid of an ambitious form of falling in love and the commitment to which it might lead.

...Refusing to fall in love with a vocation and thereby refusing the necessary insanities for the path ahead is hardly ever a passive process where everything goes into neutral; it is actually corrosive on the personality and character of the one who repeatedly says no to something that keeps on whispering yes.

David Whyte, 2009, The Three Marriages



What seemed dead turns out to be alive. Full of holes, blind spots, dangerous ditches, pathways and habits of destruction. But, finally, alive.


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