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.

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 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.

 

Of late, with more and more writing, I’ve become more and more intimate with my own creative process. I’m not what I’d refer to as a quick writer. Not when it comes to the poetic forms of work that are important to me.

Instead, the process of my words entering a state of becoming involves a period of creative marination. A series of thought infused satellites spinning round my head waiting to send the information down the creative slippery dip and into my brain.

These periods in between- these periods of apparent creative nothingness- used to scare me.  I began to think maybe that was it. That I had used up my full allowance of all the words; that whatever creative heartbeat I’d previously known to pulse through the page had flatlined, unable to be revived despite my cajoling and my tantrums.

I imagined to myself, in my state of creative disillusion, that the work of other poets, of other writers, were most likely swift and fast. That their work somehow appeared, for no other reason than they were writers, and that’s what writer’s words do. They appear and they are shared, and they are read by hungry eyes such as mine who then sit back and wonder why their own words don’t appear in the same way.

Such is the delusion.

I now understand these in between zones to be a necessary creative space, an important, intangible piece of the process that not only acts in service of my capacity to write, but even more so: the writing exists because of them.

The decision to write what you’re reading now has come about as a part of this unfolding, of these hard-won understandings. It is an act of honoring process- my process- regardless of whether it’s the same or different or somewhere in between as everyone else’s.

Creating, I’m learning, is about dancing in the spaces between the things that already exist.

Creating, I’m learning, is allowing yourself to be a little bit lost.

To swim in the space between the idea and the thing looking to be created.

And beyond that, the creativity itself is neither the idea nor the thing; it’s the emptiness between them.

Our ability to consistently create- our willingness to be people who consistently create- is directly proportionate to our ability to hold space for the unknown. To let go of the control.

The beauty of that being that to create is to allow oneself to be constantly surprised.

To rest in the space between does not mean that something’s wrong or nothing’s coming. Quite the opposite in fact.

The nothingness, the feeling of stuckness, the I have no idea-ness is not a nothingness at all but a vortex of potential.

To be in between is to rest in the space of the creative transition. A moment of wordless suspense. Your willingness to float here- and to continue to do something even if what appears is far from what you intended to create- is what helps you develop creative faith.

So, when you inevitably, expectedly, meet this space again, you will delight in the possibility of the download while you do the gritty work of continuing to show up.

And when you do, my friend, know that the rest of us who seek to do creative work will at some point meet you there.

Three Things For You

As I type this, I myself am in the satellite space of creation. The time I often need to bring a creative piece to life makes it hard to write to a schedule, and to be honest, I don’t want to force one.

That said, I’m unhappy with the communication void this can create in the moments in between.

So three things for you…

1.  What you’re reading now is a new weekly missive I’m calling Listen To Your Art. She will contain weekly musings, thoughts and sharings of things I’ve learned from the creative process and what it means to live a creative life, in a way that’s hopefully encouraging of you to do the same.

2.  On Wednesday’s, we’ll be starting The Wonder Files. A weekly feature of a plant or animal and the details I’ve learned about them that have led to awe and wonder. Wonder, I believe, is the portal to care. To share wonder is a form of activism, a creation of a link in the curiosity chain that will, should my wish come to life, lead us to care more deeply and participate more actively to protect and nurture this amazing world that we’re a part of.

3. Everything I’ve outlined above is available to you as a free subscriber (in addition to the usual poems and writing). I’m so grateful for you being here, it’s quite hard to express. Becoming a paid member, should that be an option, not only supports me in creating this work, but also gives you access to our monthly creative call, behind the scenes notes from my work, and access to community threads and conversations. I’d love you to be a part of it if you are moved to.

It’s always amazing to hear from you, so I’d love you to share. What do you think you can practice to help you develop more creative faith?

Take care of your gentle selves,

Much love,

xx Jane