Build your own little life boat
to navigate the rising flood
Hello Friends
Thank you for sailing along with me aboard this little Life Boat that we make together each week, with our hands and hearts and minds. It’s been a long time in the building. I have been writing these weekly posts for a little over five years, and almost exactly two years ago I launched it on this platform under the title ‘The Life Boat’.
A boat contains and holds safe its cargo and passengers. It is supported, like all things on this blue-green planet, by water. It takes us places too, on voyages of discovery and exchange. For an islander, a boat is life-sustaining. Our Orkney ferries are referred to, quite rightly, as ‘lifeline’ services.
When I launched this Life Boat it was my aspiration to create something that might help me, and others, stay buoyant, something that might be a container, a vessel, a shelter, a means of staying connected and of creative journeying together.
It has proven so. Rich conversations and valued friendships have grown here, among our little community of fellow voyagers. So, although I try not to set too much store by metrics and numbers, it can’t deny it’s been a thrill to get that little Substack Bestseller tick this week. Thank you so much to every one of you who has become a paid subscriber, especially those who signed up last week and finally lifted me over the line!
It's especially sweet because I decided early on to not put anything behind a paywall. I didn’t want this space to feel transactional, rather, an experiment in generosity. All my posts are free. My weekly Life Raft co-working space is free. If you’re already a subscriber, know that my heart lifts in gratitude to every single one of you. If you’re not, and value what I share here, you are most welcome to return the generosity with a subscription. But if you can’t or don’t want to, that’s fine too. Everyone is welcome aboard.
Meanwhile, back in the non-digital realm, my own creative journey this week has been incrementally slow, as is so often the case. It’s been a work of persistence, patience and forbearance. I’ve been home alone, with my partner away for a few days. The long, quiet evenings in the studio have afforded me time to let my new painting take shape at its own pace.
The brush I’ve been using is barely a millimetre wide. The tiny gesture of a simple brushmark is the work of a moment. But when it’s repeated again and again and again, something else arises. Something big and powerful. A wave. A world. A deluge!
Someone asked me recently if I saw myself as a Scottish/Orkney painter or if I had an international sense of artistic identity. It was a question, I think, about scale, maybe about identity, perhaps about ambition too: big or small? Wide or narrow? Specific or universal?
I think this is a false binary. We all have just one body, just one point of insertion into the world. We get just one specific place and moment to be alive in. One word to add to the line. One brushmark to make each moment, every one of them finite and limited and insufficient. But something much bigger flows through that narrow channel.
As
has written so beautifully this week:“The deluge of information is real. And our thoughts and even emotions need to be softly squeezed through the single line of text…all pushed through there”.
It is, he thinks:
“…the power of limitation perhaps. It has something to do with being able to make art in a flood. Being able to build a world, a little house of ideas in a massive avalanche of everything…In a world that is clearly addicted to artificially processed data abundance, it might be time to find a way through a single dot or line or vessel or image.”
Our individual lives might be small and the work we can do smaller still, but this is not a weakness. It’s a feature.
Each brushmark or word or note of music we create is lifted out of the inchoate whole and softly squeezed and shaped and then glued together with another one. And so, bit by bit, we build a little life boat of art. In it, we can navigate the rising flood that churns around and through us.
My little paintbrush is looking a bit threadbare now. No wonder. I’ve been using it to build a life boat.
The Life Raft Co-Creating Community
Climb aboard with me! 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
"The brush I’ve been using is barely a millimetre wide. The tiny gesture of a simple brushmark is the work of a moment. But when it’s repeated again and again and again, something else arises. Something big and powerful. A wave. A world. A deluge!"
A person takes a thousand steps. A thousand people take a step together. And so something happens.
Oh! The lovely paintbrush! Sadly all mine recently have been if the decorating variety but I really hope to climb back aboard next week from my new space. x