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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green grass

there is green grass

all around the gravestones

I see it now

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ripe sun

the ripe sun of autumn

falls sideways across

my face

warmth

at last

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power, vulnerability

We are powerful beyond measure, and so deeply vulnerable at the same time. This may seem like a dichotomy, but it isn’t. We have misunderstood real power. It has been something assertive, non-surrendering, pushing on through. This is not real power. This is simply willfulness. Real power is something else- receptivity, openness, the courage to keep your heart open on the darkest of days, the strength to feel it all even when the odds are stacked against you. Real power is showing up with your heart on your sleeve and absolutely refusing to waste one moment of your life hidden behind edginess and armor. 


 Jeff Brown


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wild moments

Someone in my family asked me to send them reviews and critiques of my show. I don't know how to explain to them that, apart from the fact that no contemporary art critic would have any reason to visit a show like mine, the views of people from that world would mean nothing to me.

I don't want to know if a critic judges my work to be 'good' or 'bad'. What I want to know (and I don't mean, you must tell me, only that I would find it interesting to hear...) is whether it touches you or not. Does some part of your imagination respond to the corner of a painting, does something in your belly move as you read a poem? There's nothing I can do to make something touch you. I can't meet the right people, go to the right places, learn what's in and what's out, or learn a particular way of talking. I can only share my explorations with you, for you to do with as you will.

Here are some of the things that did mean something to me:

...the twenty-nine year old horn player working in a restaurant to put herself through training to be a teacher, who said, 'this is the best art I've ever seen' and was prepared to pay out for an original watercolour

....the two kids watching me making abstract figures in the sand, saying 'but wot is it? wot is it?', then running up and down the space shouting 'it's weird, it's weird!'. Then when I started shaking the paper their imaginations getting the better of them... 'look, there's a fox, oh, it's a squirrel, now it's a bird...'

...the fifteen-year-old daughter of the AA man who fixed my car who's preparing a portfolio for art college playing with the sand, then wanting to know where she could get some

...watching five kids all painting into sand at the same time

...the realisation that people were interested enough in moving sand to want to film and photograph it on their cameras

...so many friends and family turning up to try out the experience I had made for them

...someone telling me that after listening to the music, watching the sand, and listening to the poetry, they felt how they would normally feel after a good yoga class

...seeing the faces of two old friends I hadn't seen for many decades

....the generosity of the friends who bought pictures, and the care and deliberation that went on as they were making up their minds

...the unfailing good humour and generosity of the poet, turning up day after day, to perform an astonishing piece

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on the ebb tide beach

everything we pick up

is alive

Basho 1644-94

Japan

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From flash to full-length fiction...

Interesting piece on writing process from Tom Gillespie..



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Wild Life 2013

GROUND

is what lies beneath our feet. It is the place where we already stand; a state of recognition, the place or the circumstances to which we belong whether we wish to or not. It is what holds and supports us, but also what we do not want to be true; it is what challenges us, physically or psychologically, irrespective of our abstract needs. It is the living, underlying foundation that tells us what we are, where we are, what season we are in and what, no matter what we wish in the abstract, is about to happen in our body, in the world or in the conversation between the two. To come to ground is to find a home in circumstances and to face the truth, no matter how difficult that truth may be; to come to ground is to begin the courageous conversation, to step into difficulty and by taking that first step, begin the movement through all difficulties at the same time, to find the support and foundation that has been beneath our feet all along, a place to step onto, a place on which to stand and a place from which to step.


GROUND taken from the upcoming reader's circle essay series. ©2013: David Whyte.