It's not always about the miraculous

Sometimes being creative is not a viable option. It just isn't. Inspiration is at a low ebb. Inspiration is like that. Lao Tzu said that, "there is a time for being in motion, a time for being at rest; a time for being safe, a time for taking risks" etc, etc- he said quite a bit more, but you get the idea.

Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.

We are subject to natural law and we resist it at our peril. A master does not  try to oppose, she uses the momentum of her adversary to defeat him. A friend reminded me a couple of weeks ago of something Picasso said,"every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction." 

Well I have long thought that symbolic acts are beloved of whatever creative intelligence underlies the totality of being. Either these acts set in motion a chain of events, or they are part of a sequence which is already in motion. Whichever is true, I could care less. But it would be hard.
 
I realised that the most creative thing was to immerse myself in the banal.  I started by giving away a lovely glass desk and a massive magnetic whiteboard. I purged old files, emptied in trays, some for the first time.

Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people's approval and you will be their prisoner. (Lao Tzu)

I carried on to scrub, scour, clear and clean inside and out until my fingers hurt. I found yet more crap that needs to go and began to feel the relief and the virtue of lightening my load. I painted, filled, sanded, painted, filled, swept, hoovered and I hung beautiful pictures on the walls.

I am still between careers with no idea of what will change that. I am still shit scared that my family will end up homeless and it will be my fault. I still feel quite ill equipped to cope with what's on my plate, never mind a second helping or (my just) dessert.

And now I'm sitting not in a builders office, but in a place where I can honour people's dreams, purge and throw away their useless baggage. Where I can join in with creation. So it probably hasn't been a complete waste of time.

As one of my closest and wisest friends, Avril told me, "John Boy, you have to get out of your own way and let it roll."

Lord of all i survey

For 26 years I was a roofer. For about 15 of those I was a specialist lead worker. On site I could earn £30 an hour, take home £1,000 a week. I was physically very strong, highly skilled, relatively personable, very experienced. And what I didn't know I would ask.

You work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth

This was because the first lesson I got as a roofing labourer was that if I ever I thought I had arrived it meant that I hadn't arrived at all. Humility, not knowing- the Taoist calls it the beginners mind- is the prerequisite to all learning.

It has taken a long time to apply this lesson to other things.

Roofing is one of the most physically demanding "trades" there is. Traditionally, roofers have bad backs, bad knees and quite a disproportionate number have bad drug habits. Because of the last of these, I managed to ignore the first and after 15 years it brought me to my (still quite good) knees.

Nine times out of ten, two out of three is not bad.

That first humiliation was mental, emotional and spiritual, and I changed a great many bad habits, but I continued to neglect my spine and 5 or 6 years later it said enough. It had been bad for years but two prolapsed discs wasn't something I could just walk off.

So I got off the tools and built a nice office and got a nice computer. Bought a fancy 4 wheel drive.

But if you in your pain call birth an affliction and the support of the flesh a curse written upon your brow, then I answer that naught but the sweat of your brow shall wash away that which is written.

For another 5 years I expanded the roofing business,  a great many opportunities came and went and fantastically large (for me) sums of money passed through my bank account. I got busier and busier and the problems and challenges got bigger and bigger. I tried to make big money and took some big risks.

But if I was honest, (which for the most part, especially with myself, I was not) my heart wasn't really in it. And success, like my heart, wasn't in it either. I became a slave to it, I worked hard to pay my overheads and to keep men in work. I lost myself in the stress and the details of it.

A master reputedly once said, "what shall it profit a man who gains the world and loses his soul?" My reply to him would be, "how much more empty then is it for me to lose my soul and not even be able to pay off my overdraft?

And what is it to work with love? It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.

This year I have mercilessly cut my overheads, got rid of the vehicles that weren't already paid for and laid off the guys who worked for me. One by one I have been shedding the excuses I made for not doing what I must do, but which tears me apart and then puts me back together in some hitherto unknown form.

I've made a decision to let inspiration and creativity guide me. To reconnect with my essential nature- Find out if I even possess such a thing.

Every time I stop, get a chance to breathe, tears well up from deep inside of me. I suspect that it's because I have fucked up so badly that there is no way back. Or maybe it's because my heart is calling me to lead me back home.

As my dad might have said, I'll be buggered if I know.

Hitting and bouncing along the bottom

If ever there was a (perceived) need to make money to survive it would be apparent now. Having done almost no work and had almost no income this year, the cries to get productive are becoming louder and more pressing, internally and externally.

Now if I could say that there were a magnus opus about to pop out of the ether, it would be easier to say, "not now, maybe, but soon." But there is none- just a steep, slippery slope to climb.

Anyway enough of my complaints, suffice it to say that the question that is now being asked is, "Is it reasonable for me to pursue a life of creative endeavour, to do what I like and like what I do?" The answer most people would give to such a question would probably be negative.

So maybe what is really being asked is, "do I have the courage of my convictions, after so many false starts, promising as they may have been, to rely on inspiration to save and sustain me and my family. Do I dare to take the idea that I will be supported in doing what makes me happy to its logical conclusion?" That conclusion feels something less than foregone to me, for once I will be happy to be wrong about it.

My beautiful elder daughter Charlotte, in her quest to get the best degree that she can, has lately become somewhat reclusive and withdrawn. I gave her an assignment, to go out and have fun, to mix more, to nurture the friendships she has and to build new ones. This shouldn't be too testing a task for a lovely 20 year old with perfectly adequate social skills, and a great sense of humour, (Excuse me for digressing here).

She promised me that she would and promptly started to make arrangements to meet up with old and new friends. Later that day she cheekily sent me an assignment, to write something little each week, a blog or something. So this small start is dedicated to her although it is really for me.

Rather than pore over this little piece of writing to make sure it looks lovely and sounds perfect and whoever reads it will be impressed and think I'm really clever and I can write, instead I will just define some of the next steps I will take. Not for your benefit, (clearly) but for my own.

eternity to the ungodly is a night that has no sunrise

I resolve to write something in this or one of my other blogs each week (maybe one day something in each of them). Before the next blog comes out I am also going to revive my newsletter. Although it was always meant to be an occasional newsletter, sadly, its publication has become (ever) more seldom and sparsely sporadic is more aptly descriptive.
The blogs and the newsletter are building to the launch of the new website I'm building. Subscribe to this blog to see what happens next.

good morning beautiful

what i like to think it looks like inside my mind

So here I am each morning, agonising and self reflective as only a true tortured artist can be. I write about the rain parched, desolate terrain of the artistic temperament. In the hope that normal people, unburdened by my lofty aspirations, can at least get a glimmer of what they, poor two dimensional people, could never hope to encounter in their dull, ordinary, lives.

While I do this, the machinery of mind whirrs and rumbles in the background. There is a constant nagging undertone which gnaws and eats away at my wonderful inspired ideas. It gnaws away in, I would like to say, ever more inventive and destructive ways. But if the truth be told, and it irks me to say this, it seems that I am quite more simple, far easier to waylay, than I would like you to think.

what it actually looks like in my mind

This is an ego double whammy- I am offended that it doesn't have to go to any great lengths, be creative, inventive, even particularly interested, to think up new and cunning strategies to thwart me. And it is just this self obsessed introspection that is the precise indicator of my thralldom to the not-so-subtle machinations of the ancient adversary.

Always an over achiever at under achieving, I do not just swallow the hook, line and sinker. I take the rod and most of the anglers arm too and gulp it back deeply and blindly. It usually will take a while to extricate this mess of metal, nylon, carbon fibre, bone and gristle, and an assortment of other nasty little things.

And there is the clue there to the purpose of such awful habits. Time is spent in efforts to solve these problems, which pile up and become astonishingly difficult to solve. Time can be spent, energy expended, life wasted, regrets amassed, filed and later pored and picked over, nursed and fed.
This too takes time (to do it right).

Reading this back I am laughing at myself, my art, my pretension, my preciousness.

Who really gives a shit?

take up your bed and walk

 

I have waited so long for the perfect piece to come along. It irks me that it is still yet 'to arise'. Lately it seems to be further away than ever. In the cold daybreak light, it is blatantly obvious that if I don't write, then no great piece of writing will appear, but as obvious as it is, it is the last thing to occur to me.

So, obviously, I don't write. I find it more instructive to berate myself for not doing so. When I do write I turn out crap like this. I read it, criticise it, deconstruct it, edit it. Then I delete it. I start posts, select stunning pictures to grace the crumbs of profundity, which I intend to scatter among my wisdom starved and utterly grateful followers.

I notice with dismay my conceit, my arrogance. Of course I dispatch myself with short shrift, with the utter contempt such pretensions warrant. It is the very least I can do, as an even minded and dispassionate observer, a lover of the written word (when correctly executed, you understand).

Enough about the incessant, inane, internal chatter, that mumbles behind my creative bent.

Does every piece of writing have to involve this torturous birth process, this forming and squeezing out of things that seem too large to come through? Do they have to pop out and look at you as if there was no effort on your part, as if to say... "look at me! aren't you overjoyed to see me, and wasn't that a breeze?"

And let's put to one side, for now, the relative ugliness or unworthiness of what eventually does emerge. If my children are thought to be less handsome, more stunted, misspelt, ill considered, uncouth, or more asinine, less sensible, or weirder than the children of others, are misconstrued, misunderstood, don't mix well with others, should I love them any less?

Probably. In all good conscience, not. If the truth be told, they too deserve to live.

 

On why stultification is no walk in the woods

I think it is time to recap on some recent developments. I had awoken the dreamer in me, agreed to follow his heart. I set out with high hopes, a bright outlook and a little spotted handkerchief tied on the end of a stick. Not too far along the way I was joined by some familiar traveling companions.

You know the type. At first you are glad for some (or any) company. But as minutes turn into hours, hours turn into days, days turn into weeks, you wish you had been more selective from the start. Your 'friends' seems to dictate where you head next, who you talk to, what you discuss, even the tone of the conversation. Soon it seems that your whole life has been hijacked.

The first of these interlopers was cynicism. Back in the day it made me cool. Nothing ruffles the cynic. Not a hair is displaced, nor any stride broken by unwanted sentiment. Kind words don't touch him. And hope?... only someone who is unacquainted with the facts would hold out any.

Next came sarcasm, that bastard son of cynicism. When that became my weapon of choice, so long as I drew first, ridiculed someone else, the pack was kept at bay. I wasn't always quickest and had to man up, as a boy. In our house the snipe and the sneer was the currency we traded in.

Bitterness and regret soon followed. So I grew a shell. It kept my tender heart safe from harm. It was made of cynicism and sarcasm, bitterness and regret. It kept me undisturbed but it imprisoned my empathy and compassion, my hopes and dreams, inspiration and creativity.

The point of all of this? Self stultification is not big and it most certainly is not clever. To render myself ineffectual, to appear foolish, inconsistent and ridiculous to avoid appearing foolish, inconsistent and ridiculous could seem... well... foolish, inconsistent and ridiculous.

So I have arrived again at the fork in the road where I can choose that I and my old buddies, cynicism, sarcasm, bitterness and regret go our separate ways.

The ('elusive' and 'really big') Next Step

I have been saying for as long as I can remember that I will write a book. It has been a constant (quietly droning but insistent) annoyance to me that no book has so far turned up. It has (remarkably, miraculously or even ridiculously if you prefer) not blunted my enthusiasm for insisting that such a thing is meant to happen.

Lately I have realised that this no-book (a true work of fiction insomuch as it does not exist) and I are more than casually acquainted. This really is not a complicated thing. There is a direct correlation between the absence of a bestseller and the fact of my refusal to actually write anything.

And (I am not being morbid- melodramatic more maybe) my sell by date is drawing inexorably closer. The time approaches when I (if I have a maker) should meet Him. It truly could be any time or day for any one of us. What I dread about this prospect is the thought that I have failed. To be told what I already know- you did not do what you wanted most to do.

The greatest failure is of course the failure to have even tried, which ironically could be at what I have excelled. Any friend of mine will tell you that irony is not lost on me, far from it, it is the language I understand best.

And, like all good and honest things with their ability to speak of many seemingly unrelated things "my book" is a metaphor. For everything you never did and wished it were not so. Let's put that tired old thing to bed, for as the bard himself once said,-

"We are such stuff. As dreams are made on; and our little life. Is rounded with a sleep." End of. Innit.