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.