An unmarked path that's made as you walk it
slow work in a fast age
Hello friends
There’s a bright effervescence in the air in these midsummer days of sunshine and cool Atlantic breezes. Orkney’s waters are pooled with light that’s bright in every green leaf and tall grass stalk, swelling in fruits and seedheads, turning above us in great buttresses of gleaming white cloud. Evenings are long and luminous.
Summer ripens. In the veg patch cabbages take the form of huge, fleshy roses, bigger day by day. I pick peas and eat them like sweets, straight from the pod, while my hens crowd me, begging for their share. Our neighbours’ cows grow sleek and plump with a burnished sheen on their flanks. They come down to the loch side to drink, or just stand, up to their hocks in the water, dreaming cow dreams. The arctic terns come to the loch too, to dip and dazzle, lifting minnows from the shallows. They are all flicker and light, more air than bird. The water beneath them dances with light.
Elsewhere, drought and flood. There is a growing unruliness of water. Too much of it, then too little, in the wrong place or at the wrong time or all at once. The peatlands of the Cairngorms, just over the Pentland Firth, bone dry and smouldering. Texans up to their eaves in a brawl of brown water. The slow violence of desiccation drives others from their homelands as inexorably as any war and sometimes that comes too.
Our Orkney summers are still cool and mild, but for how long? The ten thousand years since the ice receded and left this loch I live beside are just a blink of time. How long will it be before I stand before a parched loch and remember how the water here once danced and glittered? Or will the water come and dance around our eaves?
I keep trying to draw this water.
It’s a chancy business, and a slow one, this work of making. It’s an unmarked path that’s made as you walk it. Writing is too. You go on placing one word after another until a thought becomes clear or a remembered scene reveals its deeper resonance. Warmed under the bright lamp of attention, time thickens and slows, lets it flavours develop.
It takes a kind of quiet and persistent trust that what seems at times unpromising will, at length, yield up its gifts. The world goes too fast. Everyday perception is quick, a glancing blow that scarcely leaves an impression.
I draw, I write, I steadily keep on putting words and marks down. Here, in this pause, perception can slow, open into reflection, and reflection can, given time, open into understanding.
It’s easy to get discouraged when it’s not coming easily, when progress seems incrementally slow, when what emerges is not the grand masterpiece you once envisaged but a something altogether more humble, a make-the-best-of-it bodge.
But frustration and anxiety are just distractions, nothing but passing surface chop from a squall blowing through. Look through that and watch what’s unfolding beneath it. Hold your attention steady. Find quiet satisfaction in small successes. Recognise without melodrama or self-pity when something is not very good. Then work to make it better. Work with warmth. Work from a place of love. This way, creative work becomes a way to come to know the mind and its world and how these go on always unfolding together.
Buddhists have a practice called ‘calm abiding’; appreciate without grasping, notice without judging. This isn’t the same as passivity, or a vapid, milky acceptance of whatever without any rigour. It’s a kind of steadiness. An equanimity.
Held calmly like this, the writing, the drawing, or whatever creative work it is, can unfurl in time and take form as a structure emerges from within itself. The studio earns its name and becomes a place of study, of contemplation.
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
My god, you are a good writer. I'm sort of speechless. Beautiful prose that doesn't get in the way, it is the way. Thank you. Also love your paintings.
Thank you for this beautiful, encouraging post. Your words and visual art are just exquisite.