A high tide of light
At midsummer in Orkney
Hello friends
The night before the Summer Solstice was luminous, clear and calm. Finding myself still wakeful at midnight, I let the light draw me outside. I walked up to the north shore to sit quietly awhile, just watching the glow in the sky, listening to the calls of curlew and oystercatcher and breathing with the sea.
Like the Atlantic at high tide, here in the north the Sun pauses at the moment of its utmost fullness, and again, in six months’ time, at its weakest. Our word ‘solstice’ is derived from the Latin sol, meaning Sun and sistere, to stand still. So it seemed fitting to mark the moment with a few moments of silence in the unusual calm, bathed in the soft midnight light.
I walked home at 1 am. The sedge warbler was also kept wide awake by the light. Hidden somewhere down by the side of the stream, he was sending rivers of song out of his tiny body to stream out into the luminous night:
I got tired before he did and left him to sing on through to the sunrise that would come just a couple of hours later.
’s profound meditation on the meaning of the Solstice reminds us that:“The sun fuels all of life, which means that every ecological community is a conversation about light. It’s worth pausing with the solstice to think about how best to live in a way which honors that conversation.”
He goes on:
“Is there anything in this life more profoundly physical and metaphysical than the Sun’s light amid the darkness? We need not look anywhere else than the solar system’s burning heart for this shining truth: All matter is borrowed energy.”
“We’re borrowed from the Sun and given to the Earth. We each have our own tide of darkness and light, and our own tilt as we make our orbit.”
When I make paintings and drawings that respond to this place, I’m not painting landscapes. The land itself doesn’t feature very much, if at all. At least not directly. It’s not to the groundedness and solidity of land that I find my interest drawn (although
points out this apparent solidity is an illusion, in her beautiful recent post).It’s the shimmering light, the living air, the shiver of rain on the sea and the shifting tides of darkness and light, that I’m most drawn to respond to.
Perhaps it’s an instinctive response to the instability of this moment, this feeling of the ground becoming ever more unsteady under our feet as old certainties are pulled away, one after another. Maybe I’m trying to make myself more at home in groundlessness and uncertainty.
wrote some necessary words for this moment in a recent post:There is a moment, just before a wave breaks, when the world feels suspended. Not calm—charged. We are there now. It can be felt in the headlines, in the strained pitch of voices trying to explain the unexplainable, in the silence following each new outrage before another begins. These are not ordinary times.
She makes the case for the importance of art in such times:
“..art matters more now than ever. Our ability of self expression is key. Not because it soothes, but because it speaks the future into form before politics can. Outside. Because art listens differently. It gathers scattered meanings and makes them whole again.”
I’m not sure I can make anything whole again, but listening differently seems about right. Listening with the brush or pen, and the eye, and the fumbling gesture of the hand, knowing all the while that it is inadequate and that there’s tenderness and wonder and love in that inadequacy.
“I love to draw and it scares me silly. This beautiful world. My inept hand. I still don’t know how to align the two, but it helps, I’ve learned, to just scribble something really fast, barely looking. Three-two-one go.
I draw the scabious and the ox-eye daises and the roses and the honeysuckle. I draw as another way to say ‘I love you’. I draw to practise moving through this terror in me.”
Yes to drawing as a way to say “I love you”. Yes to painting as a way to practice moving through the fear.
The stillness of the Solstice is brief. We are already tilting again, on our way back towards the darkness. My brush is a grappling hook I keep throwing out in search of an anchor hold, again and again and again.
I fail each time. Of course I do.
You’ll be able to see the above paintings along with others as part of the forthcoming exhibition Making Waves - Breaking Ground at Bowhouse in Fife, from Saturday 19th July to 4th AUGUST, [CLOSED 6-15th AUGUST] and re-opening 16th to 31st August.
The Life Raft Co-Creating Community
If you would like to practise your art, be that drawing or writing or making, in community with others, you’re welcome to join our weekly creative co-working session on Zoom. We start at 3pm UK time and finish around 4.30pm. Just click the link below to join us.
That’s all for this week!
PS: I’ll be taking a break next week, so The Life Boat and our little Life Raft won’t be sailing!
Sam
So I just followed your link to Karine which seems to go to a less active account, not the one the post is in. The post is spectacular, and I could not help but add something there of value personally but for us all.
Meantime, here is the correct link to fix yours to her name correctly.
https://substack.com/@karinepolwart?r=367qzq&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=profile
Beautiful Samantha. I am an ocean away, but your paintings transported me. Thank you.