Sunday morning in a pub bedroom in Yeovil. Breakfast in a deserted bar, sunshine after last night's rain. The floor swept but for occasional tinsel butterflies. Ideas, too many of them, in the car driving up here, and a day ahead with long open spaces in it, the train journey with a notebook and a pen, the park in Sherborne if there is a long enough wait in it before the train. Kath's advice: see what comes onto the page. Patricia's advice: don't take notes, but never miss a day.
Odd, how much easier it is to be creative when it's inconvenient. When the moment hasn't been prepared; when there's no pen and paper; the laptop is off (and in the barn); your shower has got to the point where there's shampoo in your eyes and no prospect whatsoever of getting out and quickly finding a ballpoint (let alone the treasured waterproof notebook you were given, for just this eventuality, several years ago - and put in a safe place). We classify things, and perhaps this is an instance of that.
Creativity happens on a clear morning when we have the laptop open and ready, the coffee made, the notebook and pen ready for side thoughts, several hours ahead of us. Or rather - that's when it doesn't happen. Meditation happens when we're sitting in the lotus position, perfently still, mind clear of all thoughts except the thought that the mind 'must' be clear, dressed in the brand-new meditation clothes we bought that morning when we decided we wanted incense rather than the scent of flowers in the house - or rather, meditation hapens when we're washing up, or walking the coast path, or otherwise open and not conscious of being open. With exceptions. And I think we can say: until meditation is part of your life. And probably the same of creativity, except that here we can bring in the element of trust. Click on 'new post' without an idea in your head, and three paragraphs later you're babbling on about trust. Set aside all the preparation, the getting everything just-so, and place the point of the pen on the page of the notebook. Leave a pen near the shower, and you'll never have an idea. But kind of sneakily know where the nearest pen is, and kind of forget that it's convenient for the shower, and one fine morning ... ... you'll get pneumonia, but you'll have created something. I like the thought that (1) everything is so much simpler than we make it, and (2) it all works better if we don't cover it in rules and procedures, et cetera. Okay, the thoughts. But it's true, isn't it? Don't stage-manage your being; just be. [A note to the surprising number of people who read this. I'm away for a few days, in London. Probably will post, but if not - back Thursday. Or Friday - it's an open ticket. Thanks for being here.] Release a bird from a cage. Do so by just opening the door. Notice that the bird hesitates. This is not the (apparently) sudden flight through a door left open by chance; this is freedom given, not taken. Open the door of the cage, let the bird work out that it has the sky now, stand back, wait.
Hesitation? A cage is familiarity; the sky is opportunity. A cage is all the known safeties; the sky is risk-taking and chance and the life it was born to live. But let the hesitation be. Let the bird get the measure of itself as it gets the measure of the sky. Just open the door? Let the new beginning be taken at its own pace. That swallow just now, fluttering against a window (and possibly trapped there for much of the morning). Pausing for a moment on my hand, just a moment, before regaining the sky. When you're done, leave the cage open. Do this by removing the door altogether. Pleasantly surprised last night by the sudden arrival of Thursday's Child 2, part two. Opened up the file of rough opening paragraphs I did on Monday (call them 2 part one), thinking: not now, but I'd better tidy this up because I really will have to write it tomorrow. Read it through, saw the follow-on sentence, saw the one after that - and now all that's left is to print out out and take it to the Group tonight.
And put it up on this site somewhere, with a link to it from the 'Homework' box (scroll down this page; it's there on the right). Then, I suppose, wait until the 'deadline' of the next meeting is just a few days away, and do a 3. A mini-story in the stipulated 2,000-word chunks. We have some good guys now, and a - I'll tell you later. Back to love, back to reality. Heavy rain last night, and this morning, the dripping aftermath. Everything beaded with drips: the washing line, the spatula I left out after the barbecue, the fence line. And the dripping trees above the ducks' enclosure.Everything is sound and pressure: a brief moment of bright sunshine, really, properly warm, then back to dripping trees and the weight of rain on the air. Everything on yesterday's list: done. Today: carrying boxes, and a significant amount of cleaning and clearing. No doubt at some point today I shall find the bells. Sound. Up early, just before six, sitting out on the terrace - we've agreed on 'terrace' rather than 'patio' - to watch a sunrise made slower by a narrow band of cloud low on the horizon. The ducks chattering and one or other of the cockerels, muted, not out yet, crowing. But the noise is the bees in the lavender. A committee of bumblebees going from flower to flower, visiting each briefly, making the stems wave, regardless of whether this flower has been visited already. I wonder if they are conscious of flying.
Pollination always sounds haphazard, chancy, but this is reliable. You can trust these guys. And the buzz they make. The sunlight is just highlights at first, weakened by the cloud and the sun's decision to rise behind the tree, but then it becomes substance; becomes part of the trees, the grass, the lavender, the air. There is something about the sunlight's method of arriving that is difficult to capture in words: it doesn't just get brighter; it brings a presence of its own. Other details: the sky clear blue except for one long mackerel strip of white cloud overhead; that bird passing over, looked like a crow, but sounded like - not sure. One single loud bird. Today will be a full day: first, the birds to be fed, the dog to be walked; the emails to be sent, interviews booked; the loaded van of furniture to be driven to storage in Penryn, and unloaded; the supermarket, the grain, the new safety glasses; the red diesel to be bought for the mower. And this evening, if time allows, finish the second part, 500 words to go, of Thursday's Child. I'm booked to read again on Thursday evening. Highlights of the seven days included the making of light and dark, and the making of the first living things, trees and hills and the secrecies of the sea. The rolling country, angry with the pain of birth, and the sea, free to move. The air tasted different then.
Into this troubled world we came, vulnerable at first, and then stronger, never seeing beyond our own survival. In the beginning, we feared the dark because the dark was a place of danger. Our children remember this fear: the startle reflex, night lights. We welcomed the light. We could see, and our sight taught us to depend on light. But in those times, we could hear darkness, and we knew the earth to be angry. Where did it go, that consciousness of the earth's anger and - increasingly - its calm? We lived with the earth, which at least obeyed its own rules. Where life began on earth, we now starve. We believe - some of us believe - that the earth itself is changing its climate and may thereby get rid of us. The air will taste different then. Enough. There were empires. Then there were the so-called 'great powers'. They had dreadnoughts and serious moustaches. They invented the railways that brought soldiers to the trenches. Then we had the middle of the twentieth century and out of that came two entities best described by the acronym for the power they had - MAD, mutually assured destruction. But that didn't work either, so Mathias Rust landed his rented Cessna in Red Square, punctured that illusion, the wall came down, communism collapsed and the remaining -ism found that winning isn't so easy after all.
Now we have the oil companies, the banks, the 'corporate powers'. They don't have dreadnoughts and few of them cultivate moustaches, but do you notice this? Their enemies are their equals, and the people who really get it in the neck are the guys in the trenches, on whichever side. Same as ever. There's always a power elite, and it's always interconnected. The Kaiser was the cousin of the King, the Queen was the sister of the Grand Duke, and do you suspect that if those dynasties had survived, those royals would all now be serving on each other's remuneration committees? Thought so. There's a pattern that doesn't change. It's neatly summed up by Lenin's question - "Who - whom?" - which pretty much summarises a - what? Compulsion? Need, even? - through human history. Set aside the notion that we contrive this big, indifferent, intrusive, oppressive nuisance, or want it, because we don't; but we seem somehow to bring it into being despites our selves. Look back through history, and it's there. Do we live in isolation, or is there more to knowing the self than just knowing the self? To answer a question not asked today: touch another's hand, and you touch your own hand. A little late, but Happy Birthday, Mr Rust. |
Dear Diary: The Archive
April 2024
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