An invisible sun
The light behind and in things
Hello Friends
Storm Amy arrived in Orkney last Friday afternoon and seemed in no rush to move on. For a day and a night and a day and half the next again, she lingered. I lay sleepless in my bed at night and listened to the chimney boom and rumble like the biggest pipe on a cathedral organ, a sound more felt than heard. At times it seemed as if someone was standing directly outside the house with a water cannon, hosing the walls and windows. Water pressed its way through any pinhole it could find, puddling on sills and pressing under doors.
Even when the rain relented, I could see the windows bowing and flexing in the huge gusts that kept barrelling in from the West. The New Zealand flax that marks our entrance thrashed and flailed, at times pressed almost flat to the ground.
On the loch, a mist of white spindrift was lifted from the purple-brown water in long strands. I watched several sturdy and determined ducks fly low over the water, moving sideways as much as forwards, their toiling wings a blur of effort as they strove mightily to make the shelter of the steep bank where our neighbour’s sheep were already huddled. The stoic black Angus cattle closed ranks, bums to the wind, waiting it out. When I stepped outside first thing in the morning to check for overnight damage I had to grip the front door with both hands and lean my full weight to close it again.
Storm Amy has moved on at last, but too much time indoors with my screens over the weekend has let my thoughts tangle around themselves, forming anxious knots that wake me long before dawn. BBC weather forecasts a day of ‘strong winds,’ but these gusts feel like a soft reprieve as I totter out to stretch my legs and ease my mind. The air is lively, but not the bully it was on Saturday. It teases strands of hair out from under my hat, but at least it doesn’t try to pull my glasses off or steal my hat like Amy did.
It’s a grey kind of day. The light is curiously flat and unshadowed. The sea is still heavy, but no longer roiling white foam. The grass has been left pasted flat to the ground and is already yellowing. Anything green still left standing is burnt brown at the edges. Although it’s not particularly cold, Summer is definitely over.
Waves of salt water and ancient stone fold into each other along this shore. The deeper sense of time this offers loosens the knots further. My own lifespan shrinks and I feel lightened by the knowledge of my own smallness.
The sky is overcast, but I can just see the Sun, a white centre of luminosity behind the thick cloud. I watch the cloud edges brighten as they slide across it, and even their grey hearts briefly lighten and gleam.
I find myself humming a tune I remember from my teenage years, a song by The Police that manages to be both bleak and hopeful at the same time:
There has to be an invisible sun
It gives its heat to everyone
There has to be an invisible sun
That gives us hope when the whole day’s done
There it is again. A light behind and in things. I keep noticing it. Or maybe I’m seeking it out.
The sun is there even when it’s behind the cloud or shining on the other side of the world. Up there, somewhere, there is still a blue sky, even if I can’t see it. The tangles loosen and ease. There has to be an invisible sun.
A downhill skier once told me: ‘don’t look at where you are now and never, ever, look down. Don’t think about how. Just place your attention where you want to go. Because that’s where you’ll end up, and you won’t even know how you got there’.
So I place my attention on the light behind and in things. It feels necessary. Like food. Like a deep inhalation. Not to ignore what else is happening in the world, but to be able to keep going.
I’ve been making a series of paintings recently that help me hold this thought. First a little one, that has just arrived safely in its new home:
Then a bigger one, finished last week:
And now a yet bigger one that I’ve only just begun. It doesn’t look like much yet. There’s a lot of patient, repetitive work to do, building up the layers but leaving little glints of the background gold to shine through.
Something Blackbird Rook wrote in a post this week rings true for me - that painting is “a form of lived experience. A record of consciousness made visible. Not decoration and not an investment.”
What I am feeling my way towards here is an attempt to make visible the experience of looking out to sea or up at the sky or into cloud or a day when the sun is diffused through mist, a day when the light feels like something tangible and the air moves around and through you, and glitters with tiny, glinting droplets of water or salt, and your eyelashes make tiny rainbows or your eyeballs dance with little drifting floaters or those phosphorescent sparks your eyes generate when you look into a flat, bright sky or a field of snow, because the light behind and in things is in you too, and it all loosens off a bit and you forget yourself, forget your sleepless dawns, forget to worry about everything you can’t fix, and, for a moment, are just stunned into quietness by the miracle of being alive, here, now, in and with this living, breathing world.
No pressure.
I know I’m bound to fail. But that’s no reason not to try.
To the Sea, From the Land
I’m showing a new body of work in the exhibition ‘To the Sea, From The Land’ at Tatha Gallery in Newport-on-Tay along with artists David Cass and Lin Chau. I’ll be heading to Fife for the preview on Friday 10th October and a ‘meet the artists’ event at the gallery on Saturday morning. RSVP if you can make the preview (click invite below) or contact the gallery if you’d like to come to the talk.
And if you can’t make it along, you can click below to view the works online.
The Life Raft Co-Creating Community
You are warmly welcomed to join our weekly creative co-working session on Zoom. Our meetings are a little Life Raft of shared creativity in these stormy times. It’s very simple. We just say hello at the start and say what we plan to work on and then leave our cameras on and work together in companionable silence. We start at 3pm UK time and finish around 4.30pm. Just click the link below to join us. If you can’t make it live I share a recording to the paid subscriber chat each week.
That’s all for this week!
Sam
I’m so interested as to why/how you have ‘New Zealand flax’ (harakeke) there on the other side of the world!? I live in NZ and am surrounded by flax.
Stunning. And vital. This invisible sun is heard in your words, felt in your art.