Almost 10 years ago I wrote this:-
Creativity is a spring, a well, the source to connect with and express from.How neat that sounds.
All wrong!It is a sea, an ocean to leap into and hope to remember how to swim. And the waves rise and fall, rise and fall, swelling perhaps to surf and even breakers, or a tsunami, crushing and destroying all in its path.Somehow, one has to be willing to jump, to trust, to simply let go and be carried – to allow oneself to be used, chewed and spat out.
The work is not mine or yours. It is something to be shared, braved together so that we can come to know we are more than we thought.
No water-wings then.Jump.
I'd better heed my own advice.
Many real writers have said something similar, of course.
"Birds make great sky-circles of their freedom. How do they learn it? They fall, and falling, they are given wings." - Rumi
"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." - Ernest HemingwayI've come to the computer because I couldn't sleep. So many thoughts were chasing each other in my head that I decided I have to try putting some of them out there in to the ether rather than giving them board & lodging in my mind. I need better tenants, who are grateful for their keep.
It's light now and the morning is wearing in after putting off the moment for blogging by checking and responding to emails. I began in the darkness as the first sliver of dawn slipped in to the day and this was an experience I'd long forgotten because I don't do mornings these days: I sleep while others groan their way to work or school, and sit up until long into the night while they rest. Perhaps my nocturnal habit has now extended so far it's come full circle and I'm meeting up with the rest of the world once more - who knows? It's more likely that I'll suffer for this larking in a way that never happens when I'm being an owl, but it's too late to worry about that.
It's the beginning of a new day more than the ending of an old one, anyhow. The sun sets and rises, giving clear demarcation for marking off each day, but most things in life don't begin and end so neatly. Even what we have called birth and death may not be absolute as the beginning or ending of a life, as today's medical technology reveals. Any ending is always also a beginning and vice versa.
I'm reflecting on beginnings and endings because my mother's life is nearing its end and it is hard to see what kind of new beginning this might yield.Traditional believers might talk of an entry into eternal life, whether in heaven or hell, while other faiths and new agers might speak of rebirth into a new body. Neither feels quite right in my more universalist outlook, which finds more meaning in Wordsworth's view where the energy of an individual soul is merged back into the universe "...rolled round in earth's diurnal course/ with rocks and stones and trees". In any case, my musings have mostly been about what ends and begins for those who remain bound to earthly forms.
I'm trying to come to terms with what ny mother's life means for me. I can't know her life in its entirety for the obvious reason that I wasn't around for much of it, and it isn't completed yet anyhow. I can't know it subjectively, of course, but I have experienced it, intersected with it, and her existence has shaped mine to a great degree. We live now at opposite ends of the earth and communicate rarely since she can't hear if I phone, doesn't respond to my letters due to arthritis and can't relate to computers for emailing - so there will be little practical day-to-day difference in my life when she is gone. Yet her passing is bound to change me, probably profoundly. How do I prepare for this? My life altered course dramatically after my father died 24 years ago. I stood at his graveside in Wales as his casket was lowered, suddenly knowing that I had everything back to front and returned to Australia to a marriage and career I could no longer uphold,.though I didn't know what to do about either. Without my willing commitment both crumbled within a short timeframe and I began the long struggle of a new life as a single parent of small children with compromised health and few career prospects. It was tough but I wouldn't be without that hard learning now.
I think of other endings where people I've cared for have moved out of my life. Each parting has been painful to negotiate in its own way, yet , looking back, I see that each has opened me to new potential too. I suppose we all accumulate such wounds in the course of a life, though some losses wound more deeply than others and some people appear not to experience much emotion with any loss (Mum doesn't do people really, so Dad seems to have been written out from her life without a backward glance after 43 years of marriage. For some time I believed this was her way of coping, but now I think she simply doesn't feel anything) I truly feel the sorrow in any parting, and earlier losses have seemed so overwhelming that for far too long I feared to care. The fairly recent ending of a valued friendship has been painful, yet this has brought me a gift by affirming that I can allow myself to care without fearing that I will fall to pieces if it goes wrong. I an stronger than I knew..
