My quest for stillness continues and part of the journey is to find a ritual that will help my daily creativity.
I am at a workshop in Sydney with an Indigenous Canadian, and she is talking to me about ritual and centering when one engages in any creative act, be it dancing, writing, poetry. She asks us to do physical things as part of this ritual. I need to take more deep breaths before and during my writing. I woke in the night last night, took deep breaths as if I was just about to run a long race.
I am centering myself before I write like a martial artist doing exercises to keep fit. To do this I am having a break from social media, which is becoming far too distracting. I need to be in that space less, but when there be ever caring and gracious and find the pools of light that settle and sing to me that they will be the power in my day.
It’s time to draw a line in the sand and I want my family to spend more time with each other and less on our computers and facebook. I love the sociability of the online but sometimes I don’t want to spend all day with hundreds of friends in a mind space, I want to be with my family and friends in physical space, or to surrender to the Divine and just pray. Yet what are these spaces when we look to the inner realities.
I am thinking about the book Sifting the Dust, and all the stories that Marjorie Rose shared there. I can’t even write about it just yet, as I am sifting through it like Marjorie sifted through the challenges of fear and the power of love.
Blogs help writers like me sift their – stories, identity, landscapes, memories, inner, dreams and outer realities and communities – for stories. Books like Marjorie’s encourage me to look for how each of us even though connected to a world of family and friends, and faith, must also make individual journeys to walk with the Divine.
I am recalling a lady called Agatha, with Corgi dogs, who used to drive one of my brothers and I when were children to camps and our family stayed at her beach house sometimes and had a basket full of simple old fashioned toys and the beach to walk along. When we walked along the beach we drew with sticks in the sand, and I remember drawing a large clock face.
I am opening letters that meant a lot when they arrived, including one from Agatha who wanted me to visit her and yet I was unable to go and see her and that makes me sad now to think I didn’t see her on her island home, although I heard lots of stories. They were of a kind woman who helped with baby sitting and educating children and was gracious to everyone on the island. I met her son once and wonder if he knows how kind his mother was to so many people like me. I wonder if those letters are still somewhere. I think of special letters that are like giving wings, and how sometimes I receive emails like that. Sometimes I might even print them and place them on the wall.
I am thinking of taking the I out of more of my sentences.
The other morning I told my husband about three stories and unpacked them. They had been dormant in my head waiting to have just the right amount of conflict, narrative drive and underlying mythology to make their way into being. They are ready to be written and I must answer that call. I had been thinking about them even whilst they weren’t making it onto the page,it was amazing to see when another big project was finished how my mind was freed to go on new creative journeys.
I am sorting and collating photographs for illustrations for books that are almost complete. I want a jump out at me photographs, or collages with layers to interpret like you do with short intense poems that can mean much more than could be said in volumes of words. I like textured abstracts that seem to me to speak of the things we can’t represent in images or easily in words.
Abstracts speak to me of spiritual realities. Abstracts allow me to take a deep breath and write of the power of spiritual insight.
(c) June Perkins
Gumboootspearlz 