Listen To Your Art is my weekly musing, thoughts and sharing of things I’ve learned from the creative process and what it means to live a creative life.
I hope it’s in some way useful to you.
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I inch my fingers out from underneath my blanket. 3 am.
I need to go to the toilet and yet don’t.
The air on my cheeks is cold. I don’t want to get up, even for the toilet.
To get up is to begin. I’m not ready to begin.
The swirling in my head has other plans.
I’m not beginning yet, I tell them. I keep my eyes closed.
We’ve already begun, they tell me back.
Let us remind you about work, they mention gleefully. All the things you have to do. We’ll speak of this at length, until your stomach starts to plait itself in knots.
They continue.
Now’s a good time to wonder about your parents! Your mum, who is increasingly unwell. You must wrestle with mixed feelings, the logistics of living in another country. The conditioned, complicated relations between a parent and their child. The impossible scenarios that could result from things progressing this way or evolving into that.
Think about that now!
I keep lying. Keep insisting on not beginning. Still needing to go to the toilet. Still not.
Now let’s wonder about your horse. She got kicked the other night, remember? By another horse in the paddock, shortly after arriving home last week.
You should wonder whether to get the vet. Whether the bandage you put on last night is too tight, despite your best attempts to place it loosely. Whether it’s made the leg more swollen.
Now look at your phone.
I look at my phone. It seems no longer impotent or inert. An angry, four cornered, net powered monster, it’s silence briefly bought through airplane mode.
You should fumble now, they tell me, for your alarm. Turn it off! Get there before it trills into the air! It might wake the sleeping ears of others.
I really want them to stay sleeping. I’m not quite ready for early morning Lego or bouncing on the trampoline.
I’m not quite ready to do my best to stay present as my little boy shows me his new front-flip he can now land on two feet.
Not quite ready not to be distracted by all the thoughts of all the things and all the everything else rattling my head.
I turn off my alarm, get out of bed.
The time off, the time away, the two weeks I’ve just had, is not a time off or time away where things are getting done. It’s a time off with piling up. A door temporarily closed while the boxes stack behind it.
A time which demands you double on return.
The voices knock behind my eyeballs.
I’m not ready, I insist to them again.
And so, I sit.
In my mind, I take a coin and swiftly drop it.
It enters through the crown point of my head. I watch it spiral, tracing a circle temple to temple and then down.
Spiraling, circling, down and further still.
I let it spin, let it circle round. It gains its own momentum.
I spiral down, beyond the thoughts, beyond the expectations.
Beyond the should do this’ and should do that’s.
My little spinning disc outrunning thoughts.
At my heart, I see it land, falls flat against its side and then is still.
My thoughts rest alongside with it.
And for a moment, silence.
In the silence, I let myself remember.
I trace the outline of a leafy plant with my eyes.
This is not important, the voices tell me.
It’s everything, I smile gently back.
I select an appealing book, read words that are nourishing, uplifting.
You don’t have time for this, they tell me crossly.
I turn the page, squash them within the chapter I’ve just read.
Lupin, my dog, sits at my side. When it’s light, we both declare, we shall go out.
Up the stony path next to the greenhouse and the chickens.
Through the Manuka and Kanuka and over to the hay shed.
We’ll break apart a bale and give the horse’s hay.
And then we’ll sit.
As a declaration, a dedication to the opposite, the other.
To the opposite, the other of busy.
To the opposite, the other of rushed.
To the opposite of all the things that tell you there is no time for this.
We will sit in restful activism, beyond the urgency of thoughts.
And from this place, we will find, we will begin.
