Small acts of making
in a time of unmaking
Hello friends
Both land and sky are soaked with winter’s waters.
The grey Atlantic heaves itself up and hangs in the wet, salty air. The ground oozes and slides underfoot. I hurry from house to wood-shed to studio to henhouse to car, hunched against the cold and wind and rain.
Driven by gales, rain finds ever new ways to creep into the house; one day a new bloom of damp appears in the plasterwork, the next, a bead of water on a windowsill. I hear the wind circle around the house trying every door and window to find a way in, pressing itself through tiny cracks and beneath doors.
The days pass in a hurry of outdoor tasks to complete before the light goes. Evenings lounge and uncurl themselves, languorous before the flickering light of the stove, stretching ever deeper into afternoon.
But get outside and you’ll find the midwinter sky is a quiet glory that unfolds itself over six hours of shifting light and eighteen of windblown dark. The scant light of the short days spills across the wide Orkney sky and sea in a daily procession of soft pinks, corals, jades, blues, greens, lavenders, greys.
A diary bites off chunks of time, names them, defines when they begin and end. Diligently, I allocate tasks to each day and make careful lists I can mark with little ticks that reassure me I’m not wasting time. The calendar on the kitchen wall shows each day in its own little box, each month its own page. I tear off each month as it passes to reveal the next, a fresh new page.
But just spend an hour watching how a winter sky smudges through endless greys and violets, peaches and pinks, faded denim blues that thicken slowly into dark navy and on to a black that’s packed with stars or softly lit by moonlight, and you’ll soon see how time doesn’t come in boxes or tick away in seconds, days, and months. Each hour feathers into the next like the colours mingling in my wet paint.
This is time that’s more finely grained than that of clock and calendar, an organic time aligned to breath and heartbeat, the movement of sun, moon, tides and seasons, the activities of birds and plants, the slow rhythms of the water cycle and the looping meanders of the Gulf Stream, that great river of water in the sky that brings our weather.
There is not one singular and uniform Time, but many times, enmeshed and overlapping: my own daily time, so contained as I circle my home, going about my daily tasks, the bigger time of the great heave of history and event, the anxious time of the 24-hour news cycle, the time of the migrating birds leaving and arriving, the time of the sun sinking in winter, skimming the horizon in summer, and the time of our lives passing, my hair greying, my waist thickening.
Time that we are, time that’s real, ruthless, something we can’t get back, something we are always losing, time that goes, relentlessly, far away somewhere, and takes all we cherish with it.
The physicists tell us that the flight of time’s arrow is not inexorable. But a warm body will lose heat to a colder one. Always and irreversibly. Warm creatures that we are, we shore up our heat against the inevitable cooling of our frail bodies.
Today’s gale has blown in from the southeast, bringing with it heavy rain that smears the windows. The sky is a flat, uniform grey, and it hasn’t got properly light all day. The wind is thumping at the east-facing wall. I can hear it through the two-foot-thick stonework. The hens are barricaded in the coop and sulking, feathers puffed, heads pulled in. The polytunnel door is bolted shut but I can see the whole thing juddering.
I hurry across the yard to my studio with my thick winter coat clutched around me. Gusts snatch at the door as push it shut. The wind has found a new gap underneath it and sets up a disagreeable buzzy whine that goes on all day. It sounds like someone playing a kazoo, or a child’s toy trumpet. I stuff the gap with newspaper but the buzzing just gets more piercing. I give up, put some music on and turn the volume up loud to drown it out.
It’s such a small, slight thing I do here, placing words on a page, or marks on a sheet of paper or painting. There’s not a lot to go on. The outcome is uncertain. Sometimes it feels more than a little pointless. What shape does a good life take in a world of loss and dying, when on some days sadness seems lie over everything like a pall of smoke?
The more I learn of our predicament the more I feel safety and familiarity slipping away, the more uncertain and frightening the future seems. The abundance I have known all my life cannot go on forever, that much seems clear.
That other places and people I have never met are already paying the costs, have been paying them for the last two hundred years, while I have been accruing the benefits of all this consuming is a bitter truth I don’t know what to do with.
Being alone with your creative work, whatever form it might take, is a kind of attentional training. It throws you back on yourself again and again. You have to turn and face difficult feelings and sit with them for long periods of time. You have to be still and watch your mind squirm on the pin of your attention, as it works its way through resistance, fear, boredom, distraction, irritation, sleepy dullness, vagueness, fogs and fugs of all kinds, until you reach some kind of illumination, and then turn this into something another person might recognise as something shared.
In art we feel our way towards each other in the dark and try to speak of what matters. To work towards this amidst the mess and sadness and fragile joy of this world isn’t heedlessness. It is a small act of making to counter all the unmaking.
In art or writing or life, you don’t know first and then act. You act. You step out into the bracing air of unknowing and are wakened by it. Knowing comes to meet you as your feet meet the ground, as your pen meets the page.
The hands have their own way of knowing. A life of making isn’t just about books published, exhibitions hung, paintings finished, striving to accumulate badges of honour and success. It’s not even about knowing what you need to do and then doing it. It’s an everyday practice of questions, of waiting to find what you need. Like good listening, it’s active, receptive, flexible.
Mostly, it’s patient.
-Sam
Thank you so very much for your support for the new small paintings I launched last week. I’m humbled by the support you’ve shown my work and hugely grateful. There are just one or two remaining paintings available on the hidden page on my website. As a subscriber you can view them here for the next week:
NB: The Life Raft Co-Working session is having a week off this week. We’ll be back next Wednesday!
“In art we feel our way towards each other in the dark and try to speak of what matters. To work towards this amidst the mess and sadness and fragile joy of this world isn’t heedlessness. It is a small act of making to counter all the unmaking.” Yes yes yes. 🙏
I was entranced and transported by this. Deep thanks for such a wonderful evocation of place -a painter's view, beautiful, evocative writing. And a focus gradually widening to our existence on the planet. .Masterly, I'm in awe.