I’m at the beach at my favourite spot looking out from the shade to the bluest and clearest of spring September days. It’s Monday, a day I’m normally at work but I recently started a job share arrangement. This means I work three days a week to free me up to work creatively, get some balance, be me and have ‘an actual life’ as my friend Will described it so accurately.
On this day that I’m writing, it’s the first day of this new sense of freedom and the waves are lapping quite loudly and incessantly, a restlessness and churning that I feel matched with. As I’ve shifted to this transition time, I’ve had a chest infection and asthma and I’ve been on steroids to open up my airways. The excitement of this time of transition and its opportunities, along with the medication, has made for some idea-filled attempts at sleep.
The ideas are so deep and complex and I keep a notebook beside the bed at night. I want to capture these thoughts; they are defining, connective and empowering. I know that if I let them float into sleep and try to remember their unique associations in the morning, it won’t happen. I need to capture them like precious butterflies and hold them gently with all their beauty before they fly away. They are the gateway to so much, gifts from another place, and to contemplate them, weave them and enact them is the richest of experiences. I work to coalesce them into a body of work I can take forward and lead to support and enrich my life and the lives of others. The dots are connecting and the planets are aligning and calling.
And to write. Writing here – the coolness of the sand against my feet, the cold brick wall behind my back – is like meditation. It’s my life’s breath over the years that I need to breathe deeper into and exhale through, finding and expressing the voice that is uniquely mine. I’m breathing so deeply now as my airwaves clear. My senses are coming alive: I’m seeing so sharply, noticing; I catch the scent of salt and jasmine; and the waves are crashing like loud applause.
My beach walks always seem to have some form of narrative, thoughts shaping into a structure as I wander. Today’s is ‘step by step’.
As I walk on the hard sand, I feel the calm of each step, one grounded thing at a time, and the mindfulness of the moment. I’m wary and watchful of the pitfalls and traps as I step: the moss on the tidal rocks that can slip me up; the larger waves that can catch me unawares and wash me down.
I feel a stillness in each step. I’m walking tall, feeling the ground beneath, scanning the terrain and savouring being at home here on the beach and in myself, looking out.
It’s hard to believe it’s here – this opened out opportunity like this clear blue sky and all this water reaching out to the horizon. Everything is so sharp and clear though that it must be real and I’m breathing in its quiet strength, one breath at a time, one grounded step at a time.
Thought pieces:
My mind is an associative one so I as I post, I plan to add some thought pieces, some creative connections, influences and resources.
For this post, ‘Step by Step: a narrative’, I offer the following thought pieces:
Beach walks as narratives:
I’ve written before about beach walks as narratives; here is a poem about that in a previous post, Poetry into the Light. There is nothing like walking on the beach to restore your mind and soul, ground you and help make connections. For me, there is something like a narrative that builds as I walk and I intend to capture my narratives more consciously as I move through this time.
Tarot card for the day and the times: Nine of Cups
The card that I drew on the first day of being at home at the start of these new work arrangements was the Nine of Cups. It’s a card I’ve also drawn again since so clearly a card for the times.
The above Nine of Cups image is from the Sakki Sakki Tarot Deck.
And the message?
From Rachel Pollack’s Seventy Eight Degrees of Wisdom:
At times, especially after troubles or a period of long, hard work, nothing can serve us better than a simple good time.
And Brigit Esselmont (of Biddy Tarot) in The Ultimate Guide to Tarot Card Meanings has chosen this quote by Theodore I Rubin (Psychiatrist and Author) to illustrate the key meaning:
Happiness does not come from doing easy work but from the afterglow of satisfaction that comes from the achievement of a difficult task that demanded our best.
It has certainly been a time of both troubles and hard work for a long while so the pleasure of ‘a simple good time’ and ‘the afterglow of satisfaction’ are especially savoured and sweet.
The book of the moment: ‘The Heart Aroused’ by David Whyte
One of the simple pleasures of being at home during the week is being able to do everyday things like go to the post office. On my first day home, this gorgeous book arrived in the post and I had the pleasure of sitting to open it over a coffee in the local cafe.
I’ve had a number of David Whyte’s books sitting in my ‘thinking about it’ wish list for a while. After connecting with a lovely new friend Katherine recently, she wisely reminded me of David Whyte and how his work is potentially an important piece of this transition time. I ordered his books and these words in the frontispiece of ‘The Heart Aroused’ just sang to me as I opened it, :
Only a few achieve the colossal task of holding together, without being split asunder, the clarity of their vision alongside an ability to take their place in a materialistic world. They are the modern heroes…Artists at least have a form within which they can hold their own conflicting opposites together. But there are some who have no recognised art form to serve this purpose, they are the artists of the living. To my mind these last are the supreme heroes in our soulless society.
Irene Claremont de Castillejo
Here’s to ‘the artists of the living’ and the clarity of their vision.
