Time to reflect…
I seem to need to write, it builds up inside. Several days a week I scribble ‘morning pages’ or a prayer journal – there seem to be 3 large notebooks on the go at the moment in various rooms around the house. I write lists, keep year and month planners, catalogue daily life in photos organised into albums and this year have been writing daily diary entries at night! I now even have a ‘diary painting‘!
I’m not consistent though. I keep trying to make new habits but I just can’t do ‘everyday routine’. Life takes over: I feel like going swimming or into the garden or just sitting with the cat on my lap or have an appointment to keep, or we go travelling and by the time I’m home I’ve forgotten where I was! All of which is fun and varied and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Im learning to accept this is who I am and that’s perfectly OK. I’m not perfect and I don’t have to be…
For some years I have continued to say, “I am a writer, I must blog more” – especially when returning to blogging after a gap or starting yet another ‘new blog for a new season’ with good intentions of posting regularly! But I’m realising it’s just been something I think I ought to do. I’m becoming more of a child, going backwards to who I was made to be, doing what I love and want to do. As Louise Fletcher says, we all have a unique voice – so let’s find it and use it!
Things have moved on from those prolific years – or maybe the words have run out. (I did write a poem yesterday, out of nowhere – no actually out of grief. But it doesn’t burst out of me like it used to, demanding to be out on the page, out in the world, sounding it’s clarion call. I just quietly put it on facebook for my friends to see). There are so many things I have left behind! I was someone else back then and it all died – it was cut off. First I reinvented myself as a poet – added another string to my bow perhaps: lots of good stuff on Ray & Redhead, though Ray too has moved upward and onward. I tried pottery and all sorts of painting before I found what was calling me forward. It has been a barren few years in the desert, but now at last there are some new shoots – I can hardly believe it has happened at last, something to pursue that gives me purpose.
This morning a space in time has opened up and despite all that, before I start painting, I’ve turned to this – not just writing, but the public thing. In 2010 this was where the life was. I really wanted to pick up a megaphone and my first blog took off in all sort of directions – and perhaps primarily became about Sam and his brain tumour diagnosis. It was cathartic and helpful, a good way of sharing our journey with a lot of people. Perhaps that desire to share life is to give it more significance – to make a declaration, even to try to give something to someone, somewhere. Perhaps it’s the neatness on the typed screen with photographs, making something pleasing to look at, creating a ‘thing’ that wasn’t there before. It’s certainly part of the record: today I was able to share a whole load of writing done 7 years ago about the process of our son’s last 10 days in 2014: I could only do that because I’d recorded it on (another) old blog (here). Yes, it’s anniversary time again…
Samiversary an ordinary Wednesday in November I wake up in the morning dark the internal calendar flips over and the date, like a weight, settles on my heart It begins again, another year that I must carry this dragging inner load through the coming days each one a reminder of the last week of your life with shackles round my feet I'll stagger to the anniversary of when we laid you in the ground to be repeated every year until I join you there
I thought this was what I’d be doing more of in the coming years, but it hasn’t (yet?) flowed that way: I’m an artist now(!) and that is what is exciting me, what I want to do – even though I don’t claim to be any good at it! I am finding my joy, and that’s all that matters. I’ve even made a proper art studio in a large downstairs room, which is light and spacious with everything in reach: I’m so happy with it! And I’ve set up a dedicated Instagram account @sallyann_artist to share my pictures publicly: one day I might sell one!?
But writing is ‘someone to talk to’ and as an extrovert I do need to process by talking. My head gets so full of stuff – I have to lay it all out to look at it. So, dear diary, or whoever you are, dear reader – this is where I am at today, caught between the acrylics and the loss.
Thanks for reading x
Heart Space 