inappropriate consideration

You serve no-one by making yourself smaller out of an inappropriate consideration of someone else's scale

Paul Oertel

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in your rags of love

...and the way forward always in the end

the way you came, the way that you followed,

the way that carried you into your future,

that brought you to this place, no matter that it had

to break your heart along the way:

the sense of having walked from far inside yourself

out into the revelation, to have risked yourself

for something that seemed to stand both inside you

and far beyond you, that called you back in the end

to the only road you could follow, walking

as you did, in your rags of love and speaking in a voice

that by night, became a prayer for safe arrival....

Excerpt from “Santiago”
From Pilgrim: Poems by David Whyte

2011


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coming out of hiding

In celebration of my difficulties yesterday and Jim's encouragement, I'm re-visiting David Whyte's idea of coming out of hiding...


To find good work, no matter what path we have chosen, means coming out of hiding. Good work means visibility. We have all had dreams in which we face large audiences without clothes, without notes, without an inkling of what to say; the faces expectant, waiting, terror in our eyes, the focus entirely on our lone naked figure. Let me tell you that the terror involved in that dream is almost entirely and utterly accurate and most of our intuitions about the dynamics of facing large audiences are horrifyingly exact. 'Just be yourself' people say, as if they have suddenly thought of something entirely original, and as if they have forgotten the terrible, wrenching initiations most religions insist on for arriving at that elusive self. To be yourself is to be no self at all but to be a frontier, the frontier between you and the audience - the large audience of a waiting crowd or the smaller more intimate audience of our immediate co-workers. Their ability to see us and know us in ways which give them a close knowledge of who we are and what we are attempting to do in the world, can seem too much, too intimate, too soon. Vulnerability and intimacy can make a very frightening shoreline. But that is a wave line we must walk in work. Work is exposure, our fancy ideas about ourselves a sandcastle built right on the edge of the incoming sea.


In ten days' time I'll be at another Authentic Artist workshop. Hoping to sing, despite it all. Hoping to play my simple chords, hoping to experience singing the world without my body going into agitation. Ha! Let's see....

Undo it all

Take down the bunting

Those cheery flags

That got so used

to waving in the breeze

Saying, look, here

An accomplished adult

A successful professional

Take it all down

Calmly, folding up the colours

into a neat little pile

Put them into a drawer

For old things

The line is bare again

The wind no longer moves

those happy little lies

There's no cleverness

on display

Just the line

A tightrope

Against the backdrop

of the mountains

Image by Oliphant via Flickr

I'm mixing my visual metaphors here. These are Tibetan prayer flags which symbolise something entirely different. But this is how I saw the  image of the bunting in my mind, stretched out across the sky......

massive insight

I've just had what feels like a massive insight. I know, it probably won't seem any such thing to you. But I've just had my creativity group (formally known as Artist's Way group) at which I forced myself to sing. I want to be able to sing. I sing at home all the time. And yet as soon as I'm singing for an audience, my voice goes all peculiar. So this was an attempt to try to begin to normalise the situation.

It was piano instead of a keyboard or electric piano. It was loud and unwieldy and I had no idea how to get a nice chord transition without being able to control the volume. My voice was wavery as a ferret. And afterwards, it hit me. It's ok to be mediocre. That's it. That's my big insight. It's ok to be mediocre. It's ok not to impress people, not to be proficient, not to wow them, not to get a big reaction. It's ok not to be holding it all together, it's ok to be seen as nothing special.

It's ok to be seen, being imperfect. 

Join the human race. And find something out about something that, one day, I might be able to do a bit better.

How did I think I was going to get better at anything without an inbetween stage???

creative instinct

I've spent a great deal of the last couple of years worrying and wondering about how much I'm working, whether on music or on art. In the end I learned to be philosophical about the long gaps and spaces that seemed to be occurring, and even began to see that space might be an essential part of the working.

From this perspective, it's interesting to observe my internal state and my behaviour since my involvement in the Ecstasis project. After the first day of recuperation, I've found that, though I'm not tired, I've not wanted to play the viola at all. It says something about the driven habits of my mind that perhaps I should even consider this to be notable. I still seem to believe somewhere that if I stop for a day or so that it's 'the thin end of the wedge' - the beginning of a steady slide downwards into sloth and apathy. At the very least that whatever capabilities I have will start to decline from 'lack of practice'.

Yesterday, some part of my mind said, 'right, back to the instrument before the slide begins'. I played the violin for about three minutes and the viola for the same. As soon as I stopped I could feel my hand beginning to hurt, in a way that it hadn't done, remotely, after the four hours of playing on Saturday, or in the two days that followed. And it's been sore since. It looks as if my overall body/emotion/mind system knew instinctively that it was not a good idea to play. Maybe for a week, who knows. And who cares, said the system. The minute my mind over-rode that instinctive knowing, more drastic halting measures were instigated.

The other thing that's interesting is that, in the lead up to Ecstasis, I was aware that I wasn't really doing much painting, as there was so much to explore with the music. I somehow didn't want to paint, there wasn't space for it. The minute the project was over, the painting just started itself up, no mind-stuff involved. It was like reaching out for  a glass of water when you're thirsty.

Why do I worry that if I relax my vigilance, or change my routine (which actually changes all the time anyway, I just pretend that it doesn't), everything will stop? Why do I seem to believe that somehow my natural state is sloth and inactivity, and that I have to keep geeing myself up with my mind to make anything happen? When in fact all the actual evidence suggests that if I stop all this trying and intending and disciplining, 'creativity' seems to happen like breathing, like a river winding down to the sea. It has its rhythms; its tides and its storms, its patches of calm, its cool breezes. When I get out of the way, it seems to be the movement of life itself.


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post-ecstasis

I'm a bit non-plussed after my first public arts performance. It's very easy to see what I learnt from doing it; what I would do differently, and what I want to do in the future to develop what I offered. I'm currently finding it a little harder to focus on what was achieved (which was certainly considerable as a group, and not too bad for me personally either!).

I played the viola on and off for four hours - I learnt a lot from that about how I might try to develop a kind of pattern-bank for improvising. I got quite bored of what I was able to come up with..

I also missed a really great opportunity to practice interacting with an audience (which I'm pretty phobic about, and hoping to work on in the next Authentic Artist workshop...). Originally it was planned that I'd be in a dark, echoey corridor, out of sight. For various reasons this didn't happen, and I ended up in the larger, more open space with the others. At the last minute we got a message not to talk to anyone if they talked to us, and somehow in my mind this combined with the early plan that I'd be out of sight to mean that I  decided  not to make eye contact with people, but to focus on the sound I was making which was supposed to be adding to their overall experience. I don't know if that was wrong or right, but afterwards I decided it was wrong, and that I could have been looking, at least from time to time, even if I wasn't going to talk.

But what a lot we achieved after only three days working together. There was no time to rehearse - we all just went in and did our thing for four hours. And it worked, as far as I can tell.


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Turkish Islamic art of Marbling (Ebru)