Essence and expression

Sometimes it seems as if life is made up of several stories, like plays. I find myself taking parts in them, bringing all my life to that character, essentially me, and then it closes and another opens, with some of the same troop, but some significant fresh faces too.

Of course, there are few rehearsals, and the script is very loose .... but i really do feel as if there is one, and that i can sometimes recall or recognise it, dimly. That is a strange feeling, on some hidden level, to not be entirely surprised by what comes, no mater how 'unexpected'. Its a sort of pre-cognition.

Many months ago, ripples from one event had unsettled and capsized what seemed stable, and left little intact. Most of the structure, relationship, domestic and identity, has been challenged ... and displaced, by realising that a phase has ended, the curtain coming down. This comes as a huge loss, a struggle to keep my footing when waves and currents swirl at the softening sand beneath me, fluidised.

That realisation was hard to hear, not in the words i was hearing around me. It came from somewhere outside them.

Robert Frost, much known for his "A Road Less Travelled", knew something of this

"Words themselves do not convey meaning, and to prove this .... let us take the example of two people who are talking on either side of a closed door, whose voices can be heard but whose words cannot be distinguished. Even though the words do not carry, the sound of them does, and the listener can catch the meaning of the conversation."

He also knew something of the angst we can feel in not knowing if we are on the right track, not knowing how it might otherwise be if the other fork had been taken. It seems that he saw this in others, although maybe was less troubled for himself, seeming to have some certain trust in his own instincts, his essence.

Through my journey, in life, the therapy profession, and increasingly aware of creative expression, i am noticing how powerful this trust in instinct and intuition can be; listening to what is not formed by the rational brain and dictionary. It is the whole person that is the message, from lips, to the seed of our essence and all its outpouring of personality, rooted in ancestry, and flowing out to others close to our hearts, as we reach out to touch them.

It can feel vulnerable to trust like this, and to express beyond plain words.

My simple pastel sketches are helping to lead me there, a bit further at each page coloured, and seem to come from that precious seed that we all have in us, and the life we have led, paths taken. Sometimes those steps are with tears and bleeding hurt on our feet, sometimes with green shoots and possibilities between toes, rising in me, and all this flowing, expressed in my being, and relating to others.

I have two feet, and can step in both of those places, can feel the ambivalence and paradoxes .... feel very alive and tingled with feeling.

Colour exposures ...

I've just returned from 5 days of risks, white knuckle, exhausting, exhilarating, child-like naivety and constantly risking the free-fall of ridicule to a safety net of trust, acceptance and respect.

I was in at the deep end of a challenging Contemporary Painting course, focused on colour and resonaces, contextual relevance for the artist's phenomenology and experiences, rather than the figuratively twee recognisable 'picture'.

It was astounding how parallel this was to the journey into Psychotherapy. The exposure of emerging and barely conscious feelings, suggested by a few ambivalent smudges on a canvas, where the narrative coalesces from the abstratct, open to interpretation, never prescribed by anyone. The very last thing is to ascribe exactly what it is, so much more powerful to let it tell its own story. Then, to offer that to group and expert critique, is such an audacious bridge of mutual trust.

We were lucky to have a tutor, Ashley Hanson, that was so totally congruent, empathic, able to find our creativity that was naively hinting as a quiet voice of intuition. Then, trust it and own it ... make it LOUD, with bold sweeps of colour, emphatic! He himself seemed an energetic angular art form, always his hands and arms reached for and probed the air between us, seeing what could be omitted or accentuated, open to infinite possibility. Passion and energy shone out, like his own large canvas pieces.

What also emerged, almost unnoticed, was that we had all found our own signarures in our pallette, distinctive personalities. Mine is firmly in lightend tones of Veridian green, that like to range with a spot of Cadmium yellow to a salty turquoise. flashed with a red dash or hiss of surfing white.

Those 5 days have altered my life course i suspect, by a small angle. But, over time, this will mean a very different arrival point, discoveries. I am constantly now seeing relevances, like musical harmony, in the everyday, even when my eyes close i see MY colours in a mix, playing with tones.

I will be eternally grateful to my partner for bringing this about, seeing my potential and booking me in as a surprise present!

My favourite work here is of the swirling waters between the harbour walls at Port Isaac, feeling the warm sands within. Shame the colours have muted here, looks gorgeous in real life, deep and mysterious currents swelling!

Tracing the grain ...

There can be an insistence to feel, and it blunts with waiting. 

I know and love the touch of a keen edge, tested by drawing forefinger across and notice how well it grabs at the lines, fingerprint, of my skin, as shown to me by a long dead mentor, a widely admired Boatwright and example of humanity. 


To pare cleanly across grain, no tearing, and lift the finest of shaves, or plane it smooth and straight matter what the tortured confusion of some woods growth, tangled interlock .... life's terrain. To be challenged, i know i want to learn that grain and work with it, find the beauty it holds, run my exploring fingers and hear its story.

Not all wood is as challenging, some is so clean and straight, will not trouble by warping and cupping and will stay true. You can build with this, have confidence it will serve as a king-post and endure, and attach all else securely, step your mast through it .... Yes, there is a place for that too, and its much more rewarding to the novice to feel confident with it.

I did something (or nothing) at the weekend, after some paddling in the 'forgotten' shallows of childhood memory. I went back to the village where i lived between 5 and 11 years old. The small river was in flood. This is where i once taught myself to row a neighbours dinghy, and dared to ease her backwards, so the stern was precariously on the very edge of the sluice, delicately kept there with my precise dips of oar, my younger siblings trusting me blindly (or sharing the thrill?), to not be drawn over and plunge into thundering foam.

I then strolled, found the huge 'Grandad' willow tree arched right over the river, where i once spent hours, just mesmerised by the flowing water and dipped branches, trailing patterns without end. "Going down the river" was all i used to tell mum, so many times. Cows would sometimes wade in, spoiling the illusion of depths, when the Hawthorn bloomed in close grazed pasture, and the world was all in that valley, between the railway, and the distant rise in the west.

Now, it all looked so small, and aged. Our once freshly built home now looks like a 'retiree's', covered in lichen of generations. 


But the Willow tree still stands so tall, has grown, like me, furrowed and reaching, always..... to the stream.

Colliding with ... reflection

I am sometimes struggling to know if i have 'arrived', who i am with. 

I wonder, or rather suspect, that we should never 'arrive', its not a destination. 

Its probably how things go awry, 
assume 'fit & forget', not try! 

Then i feel need to show clear intentions, show navigation lights, 
with no fickle inventions,
a steady course to comply 
- Avoidance of Collision Regulations.

But, we are not clumsy vessels, deep draught, constrained by channels.

I am sometimes the Albatross, 
skimming wild Southern Ocean
seeing, knowing innately,
a timeless notion. 

Then i am a Tern, so swift and agile, 

plummeting white dart, 

a stone piercing glass, 

confounding blue expectation with its pace, 

no trace. 

I love to dive, Atlantic or North Seas, 

hit chilled water in sharp flight, 

heart stopped in that flash of white happening
inevitability. 

Choose to give up control (love this paradox), 

relish the cruel squeezing cold, 

breath fighting. 

Knowing, achingly being, deeply me, 

feeling hot blood rush to resist the cold grip ... 

.....shouting to be alive!

Faded blue jeans

She wanted to cook us Chicken 'Nigella'
my daughter with bright dreams
and faded jeans.
I fetched her here,
a little late
but it seems,
no faded dreams.
I drove her home
then all alone
I sweep twisted rise
my flat hand seeming to feel the roads shape,
skimming the night,
tracing its pin pricked line.
My eyes flow where
the sky reached down,
ink blotted
to rough sawn water
where ships settle in orange pool.
Turning, dark now.
Bereft of my sweet water
i am pricked by
black, punctured
so painfully sharp
by the tiniest needles
of light,
patterns
i've known
longer than life,
product of
a cats claw moon
all so certain and accurate.
All that is.
The only truth,
predictable,
beyond us,
drawing our lives.
Soft cloud now Eastward blows
chalk dusted,
lost,
to only soft certainty of
faded blue jeans.

Late at work .... amber tears

I came across this melancholy piece i wrote a few years ago ... feels like a "January" moment:


As i look out from the whirr and hum of internetted busy-ness that pretends to be purpose,


I see the futile insistence of rain drops to hurl themselves onto my darkened glass, from an empty world.


They only exist, tip tap, because of the melon glow street light, hovering, supported by blackness, above the shivering Mahonoias


That light sheds its daughters onto the window, amber beads, celestial, no visible link between them.


Newly sacrificed drops rub their way erratically downwards, plotting courses, subsuming all orange pimples in their path, leaving an orange trail like a shooting star.


The trail imperceptibly fades, leaving those randomised beads, no memory of glorious last moments.


Jan 2009