We are all clouds
Things are getting foggy in the studio
Hello fellow Life Boat voyagers
Something strange is happening in the studio…
The more I think about, observe, read about and try to draw water, the more it seems to dissolve into a fog. As I go deeper into its enveloping wetness, the more water’s ‘thingness’ as something wet separate from dry reveals itself as a nonsense. The more I draw water the less my drawings look like water, the more they seem to want to spill beyond the edge of the picture, and the edge of representation.
What’s going on here?
The sea horizon that encircles my island home poses me its silent question daily: where is my edge? Often blurred by a gradation of wetnesses, fogs and incoming rain squalls, the horizon an edge that’s a continuum, where the seeable slips beyond my sight.
Sophie Strand asks “How much does a horizon weigh? What is its texture? Can you hold and manipulate it in your hands?”
In her recent post The Body is an Ecotone she grounds this question of edges in our thinking, feeling, breathing, eating bodies:
“We are porous beings, doorways open to a constant flow of carbon. More verb than noun. Streaming gerunds of transformed sunlight, tracing back the unlocked energy we receive from the plants we eat, the animals we eat that were built by the sun-eating plants they consume. Our carbon-bound, cellular being has a root system that stretches all the way to the sun. This porousness avails of us pollution, trauma, nonconsensual incursions, but it also opens us up to healing beyond our expectations. It refreshes us cellularly and it also reminds us that our bodies are not islands. Our shores are molded and remolded everyday by an ocean of shifting relationships.”
Our bodies are not islands but relational networks with no clear edge.
Islands are not islands either. The shoreline I walk beside is not a boundary, but where the land slips out of my sight beneath the shifting tideline. From here the land extends invisibly all the way to North America.
Working on a large-scale drawing has given me plenty of time to ponder this over the last couple of weeks. I’ve got several layers still to do.
As my representations of water drift further away from how water looks to what water means I find I’m drawing more and more complex webs. Layers of webs. Clouds of webs. Webs of time. I’ve been questioning my own obsession and repetitiveness, the sameness that’s emerging. I’ve been wondering if it’s time to shake things up a bit, do something new.
Yesterday I took a walk up towards the north shore. It had rained heavily just an hour or so before and the ground was still visibly saturated, but a drying wind was beginning to lift moisture back up into the clouded sky above me.
I could hear water running in the ditches by the track, finding its way down into the stream, and sense it easing and oozing down through the soil, filling tunnels left by earthworms and following microscopic mycelial webs down and through and down. I thought of how fungi release vast, invisible clouds of spores that serve to seed rainclouds and how the wind kneads the sea surface, continually folding air and water into each other.
I felt my own wet breath moving in and out of my lungs like a tide, sucking in salt I could taste on my lips, and remembered the diagrams of aerosol trails in exhalations that I’d seen during COVID, how we spray invisibly tiny droplets of water with every outbreath, every word spoken or song sung. I felt my bladder, a little too full for comfort, and remembered that cup of tea I’d drunk before heading out. I felt the wetness inside my mouth.
I had such a clear, felt sense in that moment of my own wet being moving through a three-dimensional moving field of wetness that extended upwards into the sky, deep down into the soil, outwards in all directions into the visible water and wet land around me, and inwards, deep into the dark bog of my own saturated, leaky body.
And this isn’t just a bodily relationship. As cognitive philosopher Evan Thompson puts it, thinking doesn't just happen in our head, but “is an action of the whole person in its environment.” Thinking is embodied and embedded in the world.
We are all clouds moving through clouds.
So, I’ve decided to trust my obsession and keep moving deeper and deeper into the web.
I hope you’ll come with me.
Join me on the Life Raft this week
Our weekly Zoom co-working session is at 3pm to 4pm UK time every Wednesday. You are welcome to join us as we weave a web of creative connections and quiet companionship.
And if you can’t make it along, here’s a link to last week’s session replay. The passcode is: gTR?.2AF
I’m so glad you’re here, journeying along with me. This newsletter is free, but I am beyond grateful to all of you who have chosen to support The Life Boat with a paid subscription. You know who you are and you have my heartfelt thanks. If you have been enjoying reading regularly for a while, do consider upgrading to paid. It helps keep this little Life Boat afloat.
Until next week’s sailing, that’s all from me!
Sam
I think you might like this poem by Ursula K LeGuin: https://www.instagram.com/p/C5jaHBRSfC4/?img_index=2
You honor water with your penetrating curiosity, and in turn grace us with so much insight! Thank you for this wet reminder of our edgeless existence.