Archive

Faerie land.

You might remember this poem/collage from February. Still my favourite, still gives me a happy spark of rightness. I don't know what a wild blooded dreamer is, I don't think there's anything I need to know. I just like the idea of it. It's enough.

Can you believe I'm two months away from finishing a Master's degree? Me either. My supervisors either, I suspect, given the amount of work I have(n't) sent in thus far.

Everybody panic.

Which is not the point of my popping in here for a minute (hey! *waves*), not the point of the wild blooded dreamers. One thing I'm learning about in my academic work is how thin the gossamer veil is between our imaginary worlds and our factual ones; the point of imaginary worlds, the psychological wisdom in them. They're all a part of 'lived' experience. And I've come to agree with Tolkien, that we only recognise what is fantasy because we know what is fact, that they are built on the same rational foundation even though their uses, their outcomes, the clothes they end up wearing, can look so very different.

The wild blooded dreamers. Do you remember that Howard Thurman quote, the one about not asking what the world needs, but what makes you come alive? Because what the world needs is people who have come alive? Another favourite, though over time what I have come to understand about the whole "live your dream" schtick is so complicated and full of provisos - such a privileged point of view, and one that is built on the labour of people without the option to dream, let alone to live them. There is no denying the fact that I am privileged. Enormously, ridiculously so. Look at me, sitting here babbling away about anything I feel like babbling away about, with my fancy camera and my laptop (thanks KT) and the resources to study what I want to study and to whichever educational level I decide on. I'll probably carry on to a doctorate, I'll probably get funded for it (touch wood), I'll probably spend the next three years indulging in thinking and creating and writing and getting rewarded by society for doing all of the above. Ridiculous, ridiculous, privilege. I will also work hard yes, but I could be working hard at cleaning toilets to scrape together a basic living that doesn't quite cover the fundamentals. Hard work doesn't discount privilege.

So, here's the conclusion I have come to: understanding the privilege is a good thing, accepting it as a responsibility is even better. The point is not so much how lucky I am, but what I am going to do with that luck? And here we are back to Thurman, to stories, to blogging, to study, even to my fancy wee camera. I've always believed in the importance of story, but having spent so much time with narrative psychology this last year, it is beyond question to me that is central to the human psychological experience, all human psychological experience. It orders chaos, offers meaning, teaches, empathises, challenges, provides options, makes space for alternatives. Provides escape where there is need for escape, and as Tolkien also said, who but a jailer would protest escape? I used to think what made me come alive, the silly whimsical fantastical nonsense like that line in the poem above - carry the longing to the souls of ranging stars - was mere frivolity. And it can be just that, my point is it doesn't have to be. And my responsibility is to take the nonsense seriously, to find the stories, understand them, tell them. As many and as much as I can, to as many people and as often as I can. Nothing new there, even if I understand it in a new way.

I know a lot of people will continue to think it all frivolous on my behalf. I won't defend myself beyond what I've written here, today. What I think about those people is that they don't really understand what it means. And that they don't have to.

And for this blog, what I have been thinking about in the last few weeks since I wrote about not being sure of the point of being here anymore, is that there is a point, but it's a very different point than the one there used to be. I had the wrong motivation for a lot of it, but lets leave that sleeping dog to lie. I'm older and more content than I used to be, and I've moved on from many of the activities and social circles I used to inhabit. I've changed, grown, and that's normal and good and to be expected. But I think I was trying to hold on to the past here. I don't like letting go of relationships, even relationships with a blog, even relationships with Past Me. But I need to.

I wish her well, that anxious, well meaning, basket case I once was. She did her best, and in the end, she also got us here, content in our work and happy in our loves and confident in our worth. If not always, then often enough. Bless her.

I'm not leaving the scent of water. I'm just changing it. I don't have much time to write here like I used to, to make and create and draw and paint and garden. And I won't have much time in the future either. I've thought about what I still need, what I will have time for, what the scent of water as a metaphor has come to mean. It used to mean hope in desolation - god, how depressed was I? - and now I think I want it to mean creative renewal. To mean challenge and invigoration and stimulation. Go-juice for the artistic soul.

At a practical level (because if I just leave it to the impulse of the moment, we will carry on flailing in circles) what I want to do is a perpetual 'project'.  A part of me loathes the idea of projects, but the best year of blogging I ever had was the year I wrote something every day as a 365 challenge, even if it was a complete shit of a year otherwise. What I have decided on for the forseeable future is that every Monday I will have a planned activity or prompt, something creatively challenging to complete, and every Monday I will take pictures of it and tell you about what I did, what I thought while I did it, what else it makes me think of. And riff on my life in general because, hey. It's still me. I hope it will stimulate and challenge others too, but that's not the purpose.

The reason I've written all I did above is almost as a warning, a small caution for the unsuspecting. Because I've been holding back for years now, keeping my weird small in order not to freak anyone out too much. But I need my weird, she's my biggest strength and solace and source of inspiration. I think I'm strong enough now to cope with the vulnerability that will come from letting her grow publicly, because I know she will not be universally loved. Sad face. And I know she will be a little challenging sometimes for me as much as anyone. Not always, probably not even often, but if I want to grow my imagination to use in my academic and public work,  there will be times when her wildness might be more provocative (or merely irritating) than it is comforting. Or her silliness, etc. She's born of faerie land, my weird, and fairie land is not the soft happy-ever-after Disney has taught us to believe in. Tolkien, again: Faërie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold. Not a nice place, if an adventurous one.

The version of me you're more familiar with will likely still hang out on Instagram; there are always things to be knitted and flowers to photograph. Always.

I'll start on the 30th May - I have a lot of thesis work to do and mostly have just May to do it in. Should be doing it as we speak. I'll also interact more with my FaceBook page as part of the project, for links and comments that are connected to the work here but don't fit the post itself. I have no idea how long it going to last before its time to move on to the next thing - years I imagine - but that's all part of the adventure. And I'm going to archive the past couple of years of this blog, as I have done before, as a way to draw a line between the old and the new. There's a search tool in the archives, if ever you want to go back to something I've made or said, it'll all still be there. And of course, yes. Change that header. I'm always for a header change.

I might even change the address - paying for a blog when Blogger is free and so much better than it used to be irks me. But that's a major move, with major consequences, so I'll wait on that one for a while longer. 

So, Mr Thurman, back to your question. What makes me come alive? Following the wild blooded dreamers. Every wild blooded time.

Sage advice from an imaginary tea cup.

It's a rainy Sunday, perfect for reading in bed, or lazy shopping (what is lazy shopping? I don't know, I just like the idea of it), or knitting in front of the TV. I'm not doing any of those things because I'm getting all antsy avoiding the myriad jobs I need to catch up on. Like time sheets and paid blog posts and reading more of the 70+ research articles I have printed and waiting. And mentally slapping myself for feeling antsy, because it's not like I didn't choose all these things. 

A lot of my reading is on blogging, and narrative psychology - the way we make sense of our lives through telling stories. Stories in the general sense, like I love the sound of rain on a tin roof because it reminds me of home. That sort of thing. Blogging is a powerful platform for sharing stories, but I think the day of the personal blog has long been fading. It's greatly business oriented now, where useable content and social marketing have become what's important. And I have been asking myself, if you don't have an engaging story or something useful to pass on, why blog at all? The answer used to be, because community, but those communities have moved to Instagram, FaceBook, Twitter, Snapchat. It's not a complaint, I barely read blogs anymore myself because I catch up with all the people I would be reading on Instagram, and a lot more quickly too.  There has been little directed purpose in the scent of water for most of its life; I've been here because I like it here. I liked the visitors, liked the writing, liked taking photos. But I'm not sure that's reason enough anymore.

I had to answer the same question as a researcher too, why conduct research on people's stories? I mean, there's nothing new under the sun when it comes to people's stories, not really. And have you read research articles? Almost entirely, they are the very definition of boring, intended to show the cleverness of the author rather than to communicate ideas effectively.  They strip the life out of stories. And the 'creative' research articles I read don't often impress me either, people trying to use artistic techniques but not pulling it off because they don't have the requisite skill. Do they think, I wonder, that creative skills don't need the same effort and practice and development that critical thinking skills do? The lack of ability commonly shown makes it seem so. Everyone can write creatively, but not everyone's good at it, in the same way everyone can sing (and should, if they want to, if it brings them pleasure) but not everyone should perform in a concert at Wembley...

For lots of years I didn't have any answer for why I should be a qualitative researcher either, and was just as pointlessly meandering along as I do here - because I liked it, because I received a positive response from others through it, because, I suppose, I could. And I once upon a time had grand ideas on the purpose of research (advocate! change the world! shape people's thinking!) but have you noticed that the older you get the more grand ideas fade? I don't see it as cynicism, more an understanding of what is possible. Ideas can be big, but the people who have them? Just finite little specks of dust.

I have found an answer that satisfies me better in the end, though. I want to conduct research on people's stories because it challenges my own familiar understanding of what and why things are, and in challenging the familiar, it opens new windows on to what is possible. And having to justify my arguments keeps me honest, forces me to look at ideas I don't necessarily agree with. This all creates a larger world in which to exist as my wee speck, and that larger world helps me to keep developing cognitively and emotionally. If I haven't yet learned how to pass that on effectively, I still hold hope that I will.

Which doesn't answer the question of why blog, except expanding possibility doesn't seem to be what happens here, and it's what I would like it to do. It has been a place to explore my own creativity, and I've loved it for that, but there's always been too little coherence to be satisfying. I'm not sure I can weave the mess back into something useful again, I'm not sure I can't. For the moment, I'm just asking the question. 

Autumn and an artist's statement.

It's well and truly Autumn now; the mornings, the evenings, have lost their ferocity of light and heat. I love the palette of Autumn, but it's Winter I am dreaming about, a specific day in Winter, sometime early July, when my thesis is finished, when the children are at school or university, Warren at work, there are no pressing jobs to do, it's cold and raining so I am wrapped in a blanket I made and woollen socks I knitted, and I am sitting on the couch with a pot of tea and my sketch pad and pencils. I get to just sit and play. Interruption free. For the whole day. 

Or maybe I'm knitting, or maybe I'm reading a book. The dream is fluid  but the struggle is real.

I've been doing a lot, a lot, of drawing. At first I thought it was about distracting myself, a kind of coping with stress that relieves the feeling at the time, but you end up even more stressed when you're done because there is still as much to do as before you started and less time to do it in. And maybe it was, a little. But it was also more than that. Hours and hours of scribble, erase, paint, throwaway, scribble, paint,  lead me in the end to the odd creature on the top left, and the minimal portrait on the bottom right, and in these two drawings I finally recognised myself as an artist. Finally felt I could claim the pronoun without cringing. They are not copies, not poor shadows of a better person's work, they are uniquely and recognisably mine. And I like them. 

Joss Whedon wrote that what makes you weird is probably your greatest asset, and I've never been confident in what my weird is, what it looked like, even if others could see it. What all those hours and hours of drawing this week did for me was to show me what my creative weird is. That's a big deal. Huge.

Shall I mention magic three times in a blogging row? (I hadn't realised I had done it the first two times, sorry, even though I wrote the damn things, I blame sleep deprivation or some such excuse.) Looking at those miminal portraits when they were done gave me goosebumps of recognition I've never felt before, and that was nothing more or less than magic.

Magical and holy.

It's a progress shot, with dying flower. I like her colours, there's always something magical in the colours of a dying flower, something melancholic and holy. I don't know what I am doing with this piece of art, and I always cringe inside at calling anything I do "art", like I think I'm all that or something, but whatever you call it, I'm still not sure what I'm doing with it. I'm reading Peter London's "No More Secondhand Art" and challenging myself to directly engage in life "with its mind- and soul-slamming mysteries".  One side effect of reading and writing about death and dying for my psychology thesis is that I think about living all the time. Nothing other than London's "vital confrontation with life" seems at all adequate. I'm not afraid of pain, I'm afraid of being numb. Afraid of living anaesthetised.

Art (in the Corita Kent, we're all artists, sense of the word) is such a great way to engage both the soul and the senses, to understand and experience meaning all at the same time. And that sort of engagement is the core to feeling fully alive, and feeling fully alive, of being able to keep dancing even while the world is burning (also grab a bucket and help put out the fire, cheers) is a gift beyond all gifts. "Should" doesn't live here, only "does".

xx

Follow magic

I had a whole pile of photographs to catch you up on my (accidental) missing month, but it's mostly just repetitions of an unkempt garden and photos of waves that I've since plastered all over Instagram. So here instead is a mixed media/digital piece of almost-art exhorting you to follow magic. Because you probably likely should. And if you don't believe in magic? Well, Roald Dahl would say that you are, then, unlikely to ever find it.

Do you want to know what a soul's shadow is? It's those parts of your hope, your fear, your longing, that you can half imagine out the corner of your psyche, but never quite catch. Every time you turn around to see what's there, they disappear behind you. Maybe they'll show their faces one day, maybe they won't, maybe that's not what matters. Maybe what does matter is that they remind us we are more than the quantified sum of our complex parts, that we remain mysterious even to ourselves. Mysterious and magic.

Anyway, hello.

 

Takutai Cowl

 

Takutai means "coast" in Maori, and where I live we have a lot of coast. NZ is, pretty much, coast. And I love living right on the doorstep of so many different beaches, love the smell, the sound, the look of everything about them. When I bought this wool recently I thought I was getting a light green yarn - and it is called 'sage' - but what showed up was that beautiful bleached grey blue that I associate with the seaside. It was made and dyed in the Mani0toto, an exceptionally beautiful part of the world. Middle Earth country, for sure. I wanted something special to use it with, so I made something of my own.

The cowl is basically two stitches - a modified Indian Cross stitch, to represent the cresting of waves as they reach land, and a scattering of pearls among all the knits. (For some reason, many years ago, I took to calling them knives and forks, and I have to remind myself of their actual names). They pearls are meant to look like shells and pebbles on the sand, leading up to a line of bigger rocks and driftwood that collects at the top of the tide mark. My very own coast line for my very own neck, with wool from the Maniototo. The world is free to go to hell in its large and Trump -gilded handbasket now, I'm good.

I wrote down roughly what I did on Ravelry, but it's a bit messy and not really a pattern per se. 

Follow the souls of the wild blooded dreamers.

Current favourite. Maybe I'll hate it tomorrow, next week, this afternoon; maybe I'll like it always. All I know, is when it was done, it gave me a happy spark of rightness. I like to think of stars as wild blooded dreamers, touched by God. I'd follow that.

It took a couple of hours, so many words were nearly the right ones, but not exactly. It taught me (again) to wait for the right ones, that things work much better that way. To stick with a thing until you get to where you're going, even if you have no destination in mind. Surprise! Patience is not my middle name. It's Coral, actually, Coral and Maria. 

I'm going to make a collection out of these fragments and print them in a chapbook. No deadline, no end purpose, just making and collecting (and carrying the longing to the souls of those ranging stars). I like to think of it Step 1 in Operation Vitality, Step 2 of which is a mandatory afternoon nap. This body, she is tired.

So I figured out what the problem is.

I remember watching an interview with Adele where she was discussing her latest album. She'd had one ready for release a while ago, and her producer listened to the tracks, told her that she could put that record out if she wanted to, but he didn't believe her. Didn't believe her heart was in the music, in the lyrics, or that she had written something she believed in either. He was right, she said, and she scrapped the songs she didn't love and started again.

This, I have decided with very official officialness, is what the problem is. I have been on creative life support for a very long time, and it's been sucking the life out of me. That metaphor makes no sense. I wrote down a whole list of things that I create and divided them up in between the ones I do just 'because', and the ones I really love to do. Kind of like a Maria Kondo purge for the imagination. The "really love to do" list was pretty short. I can't remember exactly, but it was something like: poetry, knitting, photography. Maybe drawing. The point is not what was on the list, but just how many of the things I spend my time doing that weren't on it. It makes no sense. There are so many things that I will never love doing in my day that I am required to do, like buy groceries and vacuum and pretty much any household chore ever invented by god or man, lord I hate housework, so why would I waste any leisure time I might be lucky enough to have on meh? 

NO GOOD REASON.

So, I won't.

Which is a surprisingly daunting thing to say. Meh is a comfortable place to be, I suppose, if also a soul destroying one.

My thanks go to Adele and the debilitating effects of months of enforced couch sitting for confronting me with the damage caused by my own idiocy. I would not have gotten here without you.

 

PS - I made the new header for something else entirely, but I liked it so much I decided to put it here instead, where it will likely stay until the next great existential crisis of 2017.

 

down on the beach

I went to the beach this morning. The weather man describes the conditions today as squawly; a lot of rain, wind, and sea spray flicked all over everywhere. Still as hot as hell. One thin layer of clothes, and I started sweating five minutes into my walk. I waded into the sea to keep cool, but even that was more spa pool than ice bucket. Warm ocean water is weird. I had my proper camera with me, it was the first time in a couple of weeks that we both had our batteries charged high enough to be able to accomplish something.

I took some great photos. A driftwood totem, rippling sand, waving seaweed, angry ocean. The long stretch of peaceful, desolate beach, populated only by the odd runner and one excited labrador who  was intent on chasing as many disinterested seagulls as he could. At some point I thought to check that my camera also had an SD card inserted, and ... nope. All those beautiful photos only existed on the inside of my imagination.

I tried to collect a few bits and pieces on the walk back to the car, so that all wasn't lost. The wind was at my back and blowing my hair all over my eyes, so I couldn't see well, and somehow this made me anxious? Such an odd thing to waste anxiety on. I wasn't sure what I was collecting, just the random bit of colour, shape, texture that I spotted here and there. Nature is so colourful, isn't she? 

I kind of wish I hadn't bought these home and taken these photographs. Looking at them makes my heart ache, I don't know what for or why. Some deep longing I can't see, or am able to reach. Ridiculous as it clearly is, it just makes me sad.

Just a quickie

Because should have been in bed an hour ago etc. This collage represents a whole day wasted practising, only I'm not sure what for. My thesis supervisor has convinced me to be a lot more creative in my final submission, because, and I quote, "you're not the usual boring psychology student". Whatever that means. And whatever being more creative means. Somehow I've convinced myself it means learning digital collage, and why not? Only I got SO BORED, also rather lost, with the tutorials I came across, so I ditched everything and just sort of winged it with the help of multiple free online tools + uber basic photoshop. 

I also made some real live paper ones. Digital was funner, and didn't wreck my new black pants with white paint.

Anyway, hi.