So I missed a week and am back here saying hello without fulfilling my promise of an interview. Not because it didn’t happen - I have a really truly wonderful interview to share with you - I just haven’t watched enough YouTube tutorials to figure out the audio editing software and make it into a little podcast yet - which is what I really want to do, because there’s too much juicy goodness to write it all down. So… thank you for your patience… I’ll get there… And it will be worth it, promise.
Turns out I miss this quiet moment though, so I’m back just sharing a few nice things in the meantime.
One nice thing is learning how to change tempo. I’ve also missed a week because new work has started in earnest now (thank you thank you, dear life). It’s a real privilege to be entering into other peoples’ important worlds, but it takes adjustment and a lot of quick learning, a lot of headspace.
The gift I hadn’t expected to feel from working for other peoples’ projects again is that it’s given me a huge appreciation of my own time this past couple of weeks. Time that for the past six years I was obsessively giving over to one creative project - our business.
Suddenly baking a cake, gardening, cleaning the house… have become treats - on my terms - symbolic of choice and freedom and - balanced by work - of not work.
I last wrote about loss helping me appreciate the not lost. Two of my good friends have been through a very unfair amount of loss in recent years and written about their experiences beautifully on Instagram this week. I need to share it because their words have been resonating so much.
“I see them all [the lost things] not as what would have beens, but as things existing, in the ether of another version of the universe. And it make me dizzy, makes me joyous, to think of all those versions out there, in amongst the infinite mass, amongst the daily proliferation of new paths, to see this one so clearly, and to let it sit, faded, glowing, distant on the horizon.
In moments there are cracks in the space time continuum, or perhaps there are not, perhaps it is merely the hope our brains wire us into, perhaps it is just a mirage. But conjured or real, these moments of two iterations of a life glimpsing each other are filled with something mixed with joy, melancholy, hope and grief…
…where I expect to feel sadness I feel joy.” - Tom de Freston
And there’s a complicated, magnificent book I rate very, very highly - Impossible Object by Nicholas Moseley - which explores the idea that ‘Love flourishes in times of war’. In this quest towards feeling awake, feeling inspired, feeling alive - I think I’m learning that if life doesn’t present us with enough contrast we sometimes invite little wars for ourselves - just to generate the high of love again. Anti-flat landscaping.
But strangely, when you aren’t swept up in mini dramas and life is finally allowed to settle into stillness, a new contrast of pace creeps in. When a quieter, more practical day opens up silence like a room inside the body - room in which a deeper quality of hearing appears.
I’ve been obsessing about the word audience this week. In that we are each an individual audience to life - an audience of one - with life being the theatre.
And the active opening up to listening, opening up to paying attention, that is required of us to be an audience. Do you ever feel that sometimes listening happens to you?
You weren’t listening, but suddenly you are?
Objects can make you listen to them. Here are a few I’ve heard talking recently…
Thank you for reading Chasing Angels! If you enjoyed the post, please feel free to share it with others who might be interested.
And if you haven’t yet subscribed, it’s free to receive new posts, and really helps support my work. Thank you.