“All we have to decide is what to what to do with the time that has been given us.”
— Gandalf in The Fellowship of the Ring, JRR Tolkien
When I discovered this weekend that all the files, the folders, everything I had written, and all the images too had disappeared from my laptop — I thought of the writer who told the story of coming down to her studio one morning after a storm, and saw the rain pouring in through the roof. After some moments of sitting on the stairs with her head in her hands she said to herself: First, I will write. Then I will figure out what to do with this roof. So here I am in my studio, beginning again with pen and paper. I am thinking of the title of my upcoming online class, grain of hope, and all the videos I prepared that have disappeared. This loss coincides in my mind with the growing sense of chaos, dread and danger for our world.
Nonetheless, I am even now beginning to feel restored by turning my attention to the inner world, and writing to you. What is the constant that holds us, the you that remains beneath every change and disaster? How long has the moon been disappearing and re-appearing, while orbiting this earth and witnessing every flood, fire and storm? The scientists estimate 4.5 billion years…
Notes to Myself
Your real duty is to go away from the community to find your bliss. — Joseph Campbell
What part of myself, I wonder, am I trying to find, to save? The need to retreat from media, to regain something I once knew, has the urgency of survival. On the second day of my retreat here at Saint Meinrad Archabbey, stillness begins to win over the part that wants to keep up with people and news. That wants the action of entertainment. It is so easy for me to forget that stillness is a way of knowing, of apprehending presence, of inhabiting the room of belonging. Time spreads out for paper, pens, paint, books and walking. The refreshment of beech trees rattling their leaves in the winter woods. Reading and writing. Sorting my tools.
There is something so restorative about the physicality of a place and the reckoning that comes with being fully embodied and uninterrupted. I remember how the saving mystery breaks through at odd and unforeseeable moments. There are many thoughts on the subject of places having memory, of places remembering what people forget. But the first thing I noticed on my arrival was something I have never seen here before: about 100 black vultures and a few dozen crows circling the sky above where I am staying. The black vultures have only recently entered this area in such great numbers, and are more aggressive than the native turkey vultures. They have an ominous reputation that calls to mind the birds of Mordor. The second thing I noticed was the green sprouts of crocus already up in the woods. The dark and the light, the evil and the good, both ever present.
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“I heard my whole self saying and singing what I knew: I can.”
This poem by Denise Levertov struck me for the new year. It reminds me that no matter our circumstance, some presence can make itself felt, and this is all the confirmation that is needed to make the world new.
A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was, confronting me—a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day's blow
rang out, metallic—or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it knew: I can.
— Denise Levertov, Variations on a Theme of Rilke (The Book of Hours, Book I, Poem I, Stanza I)
Wherever I find myself in 2024, it is always possible, and even hopeful, to begin again, to feed the unuttered seeds born in darkness. January is a time when thr eventual blossoming of these seeds is nourished by turning inward. There is that phrase in the Levertov poem about being given an honor and a task. Even if I don’t know what this means, I can begin with something that matters. Something that matters meaning simply something that matters to me alone.
Coiner of Names
As far as I can tell, there is no “get out of jail free” card for the maker. There are, perhaps, skills that make imprisonment by self-doubt, stuckness, numbness, lack of imagination and failure less daunting and shorter-lived. For example, as I look forward to the next four months of being at home in my studio, my writing side is dormant, unresponsive and uninteresting. Thoughts of failure and leaving writing all together rise to the surface.
I remind myself that I can change what happens, leap from a negative state of mind, by changing my behavior. I remember my dream from what seems ages ago:
“Voyaging beyond the bathtub…”
In his book, Essays for Artwork, George Wyllie, a Scottish artist, spoke humorously about art-making. He insists that going beyond your comfort zone and the trends of the day — that “voyaging beyond the bathtub” is fuel for creativity. Inspiration requires food, and the necessity for makers to adventure, to shift and “unplan the future”. There is a need to get beyond the walls of the bathtub and the gallery, to get beyond what is familiar and ignite like minds. Collaborate in new ways. Shake off old ideas by wandering into unknown places and finding artists across the sea or the desert or the road. You don’t have to go far, but finding a new perspective is inherently refreshing.
Walking down a cobblestone street in Stroncone, we happened upon a small opening in the wall, and walked into the Studio D’Arte of C. Massoli. Two small rooms filled with his drawings, sculptures, and paintings; and his desk with the lovely old books on the shelf…
“Our summer made her light escape into the beautiful.” —
On this side of the world, outward-looking summer has ended just as spring is beginning in Australia. Wherever we are, we feel the shift of seasons and time passing. Here, the equinox, the balance of days and nights, is a reminder that even the happiest life requires balancing success and failure, glad and sad, right and wrong, pain and love. The movement into longer hours of darkness turns us inward. There is often a sense of loss when the long days of light recede. What is lost has the possibility of being returned to us in a new shape; a recognition of something deeper — seeds hidden in darkness.
Isn’t this what creation, the occupation of makers, is all about? Finding a new shape? Or recognition of a shape that is both new and has always been? In this short pause of equal days and nights, what is it that we wish to bring with us from summer into autumn? Or, on the other side of the world, what sleeping promise is ready for a new beginning?
“I’m listening for what you want.”
Many of you know the poem from Sharon Olds, Improv. I feel that line in her poem, I’m listening for what you want, in so many ways. As now, sitting alone in a cafe, jazz playing, listening inward, listening for what my hands want to say. Listening for what you want. Listening for what wants to come. I want to say thank you to all my readers, to all of you who come here to read and comment, to each of you who have asked me to make my online class available again. Because of your requests, my online class, “Speak to Me From Everywhere” is now available on my website. I hope you will enjoy the practices, demos, bookmaking and poetry. This course is meant for you to keep, work at your own pace, and be able to return to, like a good book. Register here:
“Turn me into song…”
How do you refresh your relationship with what is sacred?
The ancient idea of having a gatekeeper, a guardian for a sacred place, returns at a time when most gates have become porous to continuous interruptions — we are all “on call.” But without the stability of a gatekeeper that protects the threshold as barrier, the lightning-fast change that we are all a part of overruns its bounds, and transformation becomes a superficial commodity.
The kind of work that emerges when everyone agrees to protecting uninterrupted time is unpredictable, powerful, and often a breakthrough for the maker. This is what keeps me teaching — the delight that comes from doing work that you don’t already know how to do, from doing things that may be “ugly” or surprising or unexpected by taking the risk to be unavailable to anyone except the muse, by dipping into the Unknown.
What follows are some examples from the students in my recent class in San Francisco, a magnificent group. The work speaks for itself.
“You are in the right place.”
I have been in so many places the last six weeks, from the Alabama shore, to New Mexico, to Berlin, to Basel and a little village in France. My head is bursting with ideas. I won’t explain my dream (from the title) to you just now, but the woman who appeared in it assured me: you are in the right place. Wherever I am, when I remember this, along with bless everything that happens so more of the right thing will happen — the space opens and I have freedom of movement. Of course I only remember this when I have gotten stuck somewhere….
I want to show you work from a few of the students in Taos, New Mexico and at the Akademie der Kunst in Berlin:
The creative act begins with planting one seed.
There’s a song sparrow that taps at our window every morning at dawn. Our window looks out over a ravine and gives the feeling of being in a tree house. The sparrow stands on the sill with his striped body tap-tapping at his own reflection — a would-be intruder in his territory and threat to his nest. I am struck by his diligence, as for over a month he has been tapping with his stout gray bill, going to all the windows on the north and west side of our house, facing an enemy in each one. I watch from the window as he flies away, wondering if he will reveal the hiding place for his nest, somewhere in the ravine.
Then I wonder how often we humans, with great diligence and sincerity, tap at imaginary dangers, fearing would-be enemies and what could happen next? How can we be ready for what comes, both the bad and the good, if we are tapping at our own reflection? It seems that many of us are still recovering from the isolation of Covid, from the despair of the world. And yet we know that tragedy, danger, and adversity are best met with a mind restored to clarity, to a condition of ease in spite of circumstance, and against all reason, a mind willing to welcome what comes.