Stepping Stones

Where and what

This is just a sort of update, sort of because it will probably not really tell very much. The silence has been about not only breakdown of body parts but breakdown of car parts and a few other parts in various other places of my life, nothing like going for meltdown is what I say :0) but all this has meant that sitting down to jot thoughts down in weBlogs has been way, way beyond the realms of possibility. However I’m posting now because normal, if that is the right word when it comes to my posting schedule, posting will begin next week. Monday Animated Stardust, Tuesday Stepping Stones.

THANKS 6

WALK 6

As I sat  trying to do a quick doodle of one of the trees I walk past regularly from the armchair overlooking my garden I considered the lack of physical walking that has been part of my days recently and smiled because even when there are days and even weeks when life is confined by the walls of the cottage and I do not move far beyond the space between my bed and favourite armchair I am given possibility to still walk, still discover and still interpret what I have and am seeing.

From this very rough doodle using a marker pen and watercolour I have been playing with paper and card creating small collages to further explore the shapes and layers that fragments of memory offer me when I try to conjure up what I have seen previously whilst out walking.

From something that looks like it could be a tree the work spirals off into different places and forms. One of the things I am playing with is making a fabric and paper collage which I suppose could be seen as applique and may become a wall hanging or bed cover evntually or more than likely just be a part of a process and does not need to be finished or completed in sense of hanging on a wall or draping over a bed.

It's in the looking round, in making note that I find I walk each day.  Whether I am physically walking along a path footfall by footfall or I am sitting quietly in armchair the walking continues. Mapping the journey is what I seem to be about and these charts, diagrams and signposts are just way for me to check on where I am and whether I am.

 

TREE 6

Early mornings bring many gifts not least the surprise of an undisturbed spiders web as I made my way towards the river and a particular tree that offers shade to passing trout and salmon and where I had spied such a fish a few days earlier nonchelantly grazing.

I knew that even if the fish were rising there would be no possibility of me catching the moment with the camera but I would certainly catch it with my heart and I felt in need of some leaping this morning so had put my thermal socks on for the quiet wait that would be required in the damp morning.  Before getting to this spot Mr Bryn and I had wandered a couple of miles so he was happy to sit and wait too.

Thanks 5

So, it has taken me weeks to feel I could really scan things into computer and then post to Typepad. Even writing the sequence down which I did took a number of tries before I had each step down in a clear enough message to myself to enable the process to actually happen.

This way of working covers every part of my life and without some of the lists that I write and rewrite and then write again much would grind to an unceremonious halt. Even with this system in place and as much part of my days as breathing there are times when the list appears to be written by an alien and little sense can be made of it by this brain so the process of writing to myself the small and large things that need to be approached through a day is repeated for in the stopping and grappling with what the day needs to include I didcover not only means to go through the day with a sense of progress but I discover just how much does not need to be included and that is something to be really thankful about.

In my workbook that is designated DAY BOOK is a list and a record combined. It backs up a diary and numerous calenders sprinkled through the cottage and is one of the first things I reach for in the morning and last thing at night.

It covers appontments, visits, day to day chores, notes on ideas for creative projects, personal care activities and a small sketch of an object that has made me smile or helped me that day.

That a visit might find itself into another workbook and that the ideas noted will be expanded into workbooks and finished pieces builds up a personal library of what has happened and what I have been doing which are not always readily available through memory.

Walk 5

The very act of putting one step in front of the other is always more of a considered activity than one taken for granted in this life. Because of physical constraints of a body that shows the knocks of a life lived at full tilt and living with chronic health for other reasons my awareness of the gift of movement step by step through my day always has a moment in any day when it is heightened.

This may be because of actual physical pain, which reminds me, that which once was will never be again but in truth this doesn’t happen very often in sense that the pain happens but awareness doesn’t:0), not until sometime later when medication has kicked in and I can smile without counting the bones and muscles that are not.

More often it is because the concentrated effort it involves to get my brain to tell my feet to make contact with solid ground encourages me not only to be aware of what is actually happening as my body moves but what is happening around this body as it shifts the particles of other life around it.

TREE 5

I have continued with camera and workbooks to make notes about the work I seem to be heading towards producing around TREE WALK and THANKs.

It is still more mish mash than clear response or statement but in the process I discover much more than a possible painting or small sculpture etc.,  and in the process I am happy to stay for the time being, understanding as much about myself as I do about the work that is appearing in doodles, sketches, snaps and words in the workbooks and on larger formats.

Sometimes I look at a page in a workbook and wonder who on earth has picked up the book and made marks there as I see lines that echo anothers hand it seems but as I flip on through the pages I remember the dialogue I have been having with myself and the other voices that join in and find myself understanding something I missed and filling up yet another page with the sense of it for me at that moment.

I do this with images, shapes and colour , layer upon layer till there is need for much stripping away, which in turn becomes means to find my way into the meaning the expression of whatever is impelling me to find the truth that is there for my hand to touch and express with marks of my own making.

Today

The work I am going to continue to place here will reflect the more 'creative' side of my life.  To say that there is a side is really misleading because I really do not see that there are any sides to this life but an endeavour to reach towards a wholeness which is the creative force of living life fully, as productively and peacfully as I may for my self and for those whose lives are touched by my living.

I do not see myself as unassailable fortress or secure island I am part of the storm that rages found the calm that we are heading for be we aware or believe that, I kind of think it is so.  That daily life for me is about reaching at least a grazing touch of this calm informs all my activity and inactivity. Oft times I am not concentrated or aware enough to realise this potential and moments slip from my fingers like elvers on the spring tide but the shards of light glimpsed as they slip and slide from my grasp are enough to keep me wading back into the water for in the action of emersing myself in the flow I find moments of oneness if not many of actually ever becoming the flow.

My habit of keeping what I call workbooks helps me keep myself informed of what I am thinking, discovering and wanting to explore further. Out of this do come 'pieces of work' some of which can actually be of some use:0) but each is far more about the process and all the other things that engage me as I proceed.

The WALK TALK THANKS workbooks are filling up and I will in the coming days post specifics and thoughts as I had begun to do.  I will also create photo albums as I have recently done for another project to create a place where overview is more possible if anyone is interested in such things. I have I think finally cracked the from workbook to scanner to file to typepad sequence out enough to possibly repeat the process so I will also be posting pages from the various workbooks that are scattered through my life as they are as much about my 'spiritual practice' as anything more obviously of that bent.

I work slowly, there are invariably gaps when I am 'otherwise engaged' because of health or lack of it depending on your point of view.  But the impetus to communicate with that which is deep within myself and finds expression in the living of a small but definitely exciting as well as somewhat chaotic and confused life continues to impell me, forces me to see that the creative process is all my life not just designated certain areas..

I am intrigued by the concept of prayer but have I suspect walked towards my own understanding and interpretation of this and my use of the word means many things rarely though messages sent by human heart to a God out there somewhere. But as to life and living being a prayer; sacred, concentrated in and on the moment, an offering, a building up, a working out, a growing tranforming reviving renewing process definitely.

For me it needs to hold other than breathing and being it needs active participation and that is where seeing each moment as opportunity and me as expression of that opportunity comes in, followed hard on the heels by physically translating that in ways such as laying a table for one each day with flowers and real cutlery and crockery, to giving myself the time and space to quietly welcome each morning as I rise with the sun in confirmation I am alive to another days gifts, to stepping over and through the chaos, calamity and just plain mess of much of what I call life and touching the beauty, wonder and even magic that is there too.

The words I wrote on the back of each of the small Today concetina books, you'll find the photos over in the album link on the right, say this -

Today

Today
  is
    the
tomorrow
of
  yesterday
the
   yesterday
of
   tomorrow
     and
       the only
     moment
   we may
     embrace
    understand
      and
          live.

        LIVE TODAY!