when everything is shifting, where do you hold on?

It's very hard to see where I am at the moment, from anywhere. My work grounds me in the world, and yet it seems to be so easy to lose my place in it (my work, and thus the world!).

My process is always silent, invisible, beyond understanding. It doesn't respond to will or intention. There's no point in me putting myself in certain place at a certain time and saying, now, work, come. At the same time there is procrastination and avoidance - spawned by fear of disappointment - or the sense of generally being lost at sea, which, if allowed to go on for too long, become like a noose around my neck.

I am permeable. Things come to me from the world, sometimes to move me on, to shake me out of stuckness; sometimes to distract and derail me. There seem to be no constants. With hindsight, flipped now out of my goldfish bowl and finding myself suddenly aware of the need for water, I can see that there were constants, of which I knew nothing at the time. There was the constant of the same place to work, the same room, every day, day after day. With that held steady, process still bucked and squealed, only starting to gently settle in January this year, when I returned from India, momentarily sated with food and material.

The fuel fed what was trying to burn. The work diversified, became both smaller and larger. At a crucial moment, a new space appeared, and my instinct followed. With trust, there was no other way to proceed. The new space embraced me, enveloped me, plucked me out of my limited sense of myself with a skillful crochet hook and ran round and round in circles of joy until I became dizzy.

Conditions, and the constraints of those conditions, create emergence. When conditions change externally, what emerges into the external changes its form, at the same time as internal conditions are forced to shift and turn. The whole system is transformed, blooming here, dying there, shaking in that corner, screaming in another.

What can hold? In these shifting sands, in this violet sea, there is only one place, which has to be willfully created and recreated in every changing moment. That place is my sense of myself. It doesn't matter which room I'm in, which set of conditions are present, without a calm anchor within my own consciousness, and my consciousness squarely situated within my body, there can be no meaningful emergence, no work, at all.



.