The brimming moment
On trying to catch hold of time before it falls
It begins with a raindrop.
It rolls down the fence wire just outside the window, to where it sags a little at the midpoint between two posts. Hanging, it swells there, catching the clouded light, a clear white bead. The loch and hill and sky beyond are folded inside. It gathers up a world and shines it out again, tiny and inverted, as fragile and beautiful as a single life.
This story begins and ends with a raindrop.
How it gathers. How it shines.
How it trembles.
In the brimming moment before it falls.
I am trying to catch hold of something uncatchable here.
No, that’s not quite right. Whatever it is that’s the fascination of this cold dance of water I know I can’t catch it and that’s the point. The point is to see that this water is beautiful and that it is falling away, will always keep falling away. It is not mine and can never be. It refuses. It is itself and I cannot have it, and this is right and necessary.
But it also in me and of me, and I am of it.
How can this be reconciled?
I begin with washes of colour. I mix the paint with water from the tap, or from the loch, or sometimes water fetched from the nearby spring. When I pour the runny mixture over the stretched paper or board I don’t know how it will look when it has dried. Sometimes delicate reticulations form, a fine grain left as the water evaporates, like the layers of the sedimentary rocks along the north shore, or the gills of a mushroom. Sometimes I just get ugly blobs and smudges and have to try another layer, then another.
Mix, pour, wait.
And then I start to draw, drop by drop, catching water in tiny circles, in a net of lines, each one a single drop, a moment gathered, stilled and set down.
Making art is a chancy business, and a slow one, 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 its 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.
Here, in this pause, perception can slow, open into reflection, and reflection can, given time, open into understanding.
For now, I stand by the lochside, holding a just-laid egg still warm in my hands, turning it over and over against my palms. This moment, resting so tenderly in itself. How full it is. The light pouring its freshness over everything.
A few kittiwakes dip and wash their snow-white plumage in the loch. Gulls fly up off the water with clapping wings and shake themselves dry like wet dogs, midair. Along the shingle at the water’s edge nesting oystercatchers lift and settle, lift and settle, piping loudly. The air above the shallow water is filled with flecks of light glancing off the wings of a million tiny gnats.
Hold the moment like the egg. Cup it gently. Feel its fragile shell and the warmth lingering inside it. How can I observe the inside of this moment without dropping or breaking it? I catch at the scraps, glimpse the edge of something, a trick of the light, the brief flash of a trout turning in the shallows and gone, the glint of a gnat’s wing.
The water in each raindrop will fall and disperse itself back out into the world as if it had never been. Life is a gathering, brimming, falling. Its flow washes down, through and out of us and leaves us beached on a bare shore.
Where is it, this living moment? This glistening bead of ‘now’? It melts under the heat of my attention. It’s gone in the very instant of its becoming. If life is made up of successive present moments, each one ungraspable, how will I know I have lived?
I’ll keep drawing. I’ll keep writing. I’ll accumulate my circles, my layers and lines. Then one day I might understand.
The Life Raft Co-Working
As usual, our little Life Raft Co-Working Session will convene at 3pm on Wednesday. Do come along and join us for some quiet companionship as you work. It’s the same link every week so you can bookmark it and drop in:
Apologies - I clean forgot to record the session last week! Hopefully, someone will remind me this week if I don’t press the record button.
Finally, thank you, as ever, for reading The Life Boat. I appreciate how many demands you have on your attention. That you choose to give some of it to my writing and art is a gift beyond words. And thank you especially to those who elect to pay for a subscription. You make it all possible.
Until next week,
Sam
Dear Sam - you thank us for our attention, and I in turn thank you for yours! This is beautiful, attentive poetry of water, a pathway to understanding, and maybe also to peace. Listened to with gratitude.
“And then I start to draw, drop by drop, catching water in tiny circles, in a net of lines, each one a single drop, a moment gathered, stilled and set down.” So beautiful. Thank you for doing these.