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.
*****
I’m thinking of writing, and I’m thinking how time for words is only made by dancing round the edges. That my writing, and everything that fuels it, are hemline explorations, stitches that knit everything together, living on the edgings, and nestled in the seams.
Writing, in truth, requires a lot of ignoring, a healthy dose of discomfort and the frequent, visceral tightening of frustration. Not of the practice itself (which we all know is another story), but of the circumstances to get there.
The ignoring of the things that desire your attention before you find your pen and paper and a desk.
The human chess pieces that stand between your fingers and the keyboard.
The hard to pin down routines, fluctuated by the wants of small children and the work that hollers in your earballs, professing its importance.
Last night’s sleep was fitful, resulting in an awakening when my alarm went off at five that left me feeling like I was already behind.
How can I feel already feel behind before I even wake? When it’s really still so early? I muse silently to myself, the flashlight in my phone already confusing the navigation signals of three moths and counting as I make my way up the path from the house to my wooden office den.
I apologise to them profusely and continue on my way.
The bedtime routines of my two boys, it seems, has become more of a dreamt for nicety than a certainty. The up and downs at all hours of the evenings leaving few clean transitions from the evening to the night. No reliable white spaces where pages of books can be read, or conversations can be had, or words can be tinkered with.
A tie dye-arrangement of time in which you must surrender to the swirls.
It’s temporary, I am told. This I know for sure. It’s yet it’s a temporary that’s the reality of my current days. The temporary now that will no doubt be the temporary tomorrow.
And then a different kind of temporary after that.
As I type this, I realise both these things get quite a lot of mentions: the not-so-great sleeping of my children and my own early waking times. And as I sit here, on this, a New Zealand Monday sharing tiny pockets of the truth from my own creative life, these are the two things that most define it, the outliers providing border definition at both ends of the day, both setting a pattern for the hours that closely follow.
What’s more I’m not alone in this community of gently tapping writers, the writers carving time out to flirt with words on the fringes of the day.
We are the writers of the seams, writers of the hemlines, writers who words live in the grooves between swathes of one thing and the other and the next.
Mother-Writers. Worker-Writers. Teacher-Writers. Coach-Writers.
Writers doing the busy business of living while collecting words like shells and pebbles, arranging them like patterns and mosaics, maps of we were here and we’re still coming, one foot in front of the other as they continue on their way.
On the northern side of our back paddocks, there are a strip of Gums that have bequeathed this patch of earth its title, the Bent Wood. The weather patterns, with all their wanton fierceness, have shaped the growing trunks with their hands and formed them into abstract sculptures. They weave like stiff strands of hair into the sky, the younger limbs belly dancing in the breeze, providing a landscape of both shelter and of interest for the young and curious minds that I’ve placed in their care.
Before Ada, my youngest Irish horse, this paddock belonged to Bear. Our log is here, where we would commune and chat. Or perhaps I would chat, and Bear would listen. I like to think it worked both ways. Bear passed away before he had seen a full stretch of seasons. Ada is now ending her first full summer. I’m filled with gratitude for both; the one who stands with me and the one in the realm of my horse ancestors. Both extend care to me in ways that are felt and tangible.
At feed time, I place two buckets in the paddock. Ada takes her time. Snuffling her bucket, glancing up at the scenery. Occasionally she’ll walk off, do a brief lap around nothing in particular and return back to her feed looking happy and content.
Some metres away, I hold Merc, my other horse. Part of the reason I had kept them closer to the house than where I find myself standing now is to maintain the certain luxury of the yards, my ability to separate the two making the job of feeding a much more easeful process, the job now involving more manual labour, and ultimately time.
To Merc’s eyes, Ada’s bucket is a Michelin star smorgasbord compared to his dry bread sandwich. So, I take my halter, and together we wait until Ada has finished her dinner and normal programming can resume.
Earlier, when I was considering the mealtime tetris and how to balance it, I thought of The Waiting as somewhat of a chore. When I actually did The Waiting, I recognized it as anything but. Things in life often go like that.
Just like writing in the seams, life is full of pockets of time that represent transitions, which to the human mind we can discount as time that’s unavailable in the wider context of the day.
But now, each day, at roughly the same time, I stand in the same spot with my horse, and I observe. I think of the great nature writers whose words fall on me like incantations; my favourites are not those who necessarily travelled widely, but who travelled deeply. Whose closeness to the area of earth they came to know intensified rather than limited their vision.
I look at the same patch of gums each day and each day they are different and the same. I play with looking directly at them, and then looking at the spaces around them. I want to see them better somehow, I want to see everything better, even though I don’t know exactly what that means.
I stroke and murmur to my horse in between.
The sound of the Tuis, a native New Zealand bird, punctuates the background. Their song starts and then, a gap before the notes pick back up. I learned recently that there actually is no gap. That the notes just reach a pitch that the human ear is unable to hear; that the song is actually continuous.
I marvel at this. I wonder what else I am missing, without even knowing it. All this time, the Tuis have been singing their secrets around me. To hear them, I resolve, I need to listen with my full body. To catch the notes my ears aren’t designed to hold.
Many times, I hear from non-horsey folk, what a lot of work it must be to own horses. What a ball and chain they must be, or can be, especially during the moments when you want to go out, or holiday or take a break.
I understand these thoughts. They are surface level obvious for those for whom freedom involves an anchorless existence. Perhaps, at one point, I have also thought the same.
But for me, the truth runs deeper and wider. Horses anchor me to the seasons. They call me into the element’s morning and night when the comfort of the inside seems greater. They let me go deeper, and further. They require that I move my body in the way and amounts its designed for when modern life would have me do the opposite.
They give me gifts like The Waiting, which I never would have conjured or taken for myself without them. They ask me to notice deeply and to wonder what I am missing.
So, while there are many things to be grateful for, perhaps one of the biggest is the one we lament the most; the commitment, the time, the energy.
I happily give it to them, and then some.
I’ll give it to my writing also.
I think to Mary Oliver’s Instructions For Living A Life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
If the only time to tell about is found hidden in the seams, then it’s hiding in the seams you’ll find me also.
