Gift Songs

What if we stopped trying so hard and just listened?

Dear friends

I was taken by surprise by the sadness I felt when I heard at the weekend that the poet, essayist, novelist, memoirist, teacher and academic John Burnside had died aged 69. After all, we had hardly been in direct touch since I completed my PhD back in 2017. A busy and eminent man, I didn’t presume a friendship beyond our professional one. And yet the news stopped me in my tracks with a wave of regret at his loss.

John Burnside (1955 - 2024)

John was my doctoral supervisor at the University of St Andrews. While it’s true that he wasn’t exactly prompt at answering emails, and that at times we talked at cross-purposes, over the six years we worked together we shared many long, free-ranging conversations in his book-stuffed office, about writing, philosophy, art, life and Orkney, a place he knew and loved too. I missed those enriching conversations when I passed my viva, received my doctorate, and left St Andrews behind for good. I am sad that we will never share another one now.

I had been over the moon when John responded with warm enthusiasm to my first tentative email, way back in 2010, asking if he’d be interested in supervising a rather woolly Creative Writing PhD proposal on how we seek meaning in the ‘spaces between things’. In the years that followed he was the first reader of early drafts of what would later become my book The Clearing. He trusted me more than I trusted myself, as I rode out the ups and downs of doctoral work. He saw me as a writer. And so I began to dare see myself as one too. In that, he changed my life.

I won’t attempt an obituary. You can read a good one here.

But I would like to share with you why I wanted to work with John, why I was overjoyed when he agreed to supervise my PhD, why I was, and always remained, a bit starstruck, a bit amazed, to have him read and comment on my own writing so carefully.

It was his poetry. It was the sensation his poems always leave me with; a heightened awareness of something half-hidden, behind and between the visible things of this world, a bright mystery, lit by snowlight and the eye-gleam of owls, rustling with ghosts and the flight of small birds, a numinous magic right in the midst of the ordinary.

There are so many poems I could choose from. He was prolific.

But I’ll go with this one, from the collection Gift Songs

XI LARES

All afternoon I have heard you
going from room to room, as if you would offer
the gift of a watchful presence, the gift of a look
to how the sunlight gathers in the folds
of curtains
                  how the shadows on the wall
flit back and forth, more sparrow, or swallow in flight
than birds would have been.

Like you I have felt it today, that space in our house
where doors might swing open
                                                     messengers appear:
the curve of a bowl, or the red in a vase of carnations
softly assuming the forms of a visitation.

We go for weeks and never catch ourselves 
like this, the trace of magic we possess
locked in the work of appearing, day after day,
in the world of our making;

we go for months, with phantoms in our heads
till, filling a bath, or fetching the laundry in,
we see ourselves again, at home, illumined,
folding a sheet, or pouring a glass of milk,
bright in the here and now, and unencumbered.

Revisiting the poem now, I am brought up short by it. Perhaps it woke something up in you too.

I recognise that I have been, for weeks now, ‘locked in the work of appearing…in the world of my making’, a world of emails and invoices, plans and to-do lists, online calendars and Zoom meetings and bank statements and web browsers, a world of horror in the news, of noisy phantoms in my head, of scattered, shallow attention and hurried notes to ‘come back this to later’.

Later, when there’s more time.

So much striving. So much worrying.

I have been forgetting to trust myself. To trust the work. To notice what emerges in the gaps, the ‘spaces between’, to pay attention to what can be glimpsed in them, when I just stop trying so hard. When I stop talking and thinking and planning and just listen.

Thank you, John, for your reminder that shy and precious things emerge when we become still and quiet. You may be gone, but your gift songs remain.

For that, I am grateful.

Life Raft Co-Working Session

Join our little Life Raft Zoom Co-Working session from 3 pm to 4.30 pm Wednesdays UK time. It’s pretty chilled. We say hello at the start and share what creative project we’re working on, then settle down for about 45 minutes to work quietly in a shared space until 4pm, then gather again to close with a bit of conversation and community. Here’s the link.

And if you missed last week, can’t make the time, or want to check us out first you can watch the replay from last week here:

Hope to see some of you later today!

all best

– Sam

P.S. Did you know that if you click the little heart icon at the top or bottom of this email you’ll help others who might enjoy reading The Life Boat to find it? It also makes me very happy! Thank you!