Blue Notes

Start with a colour...

Feb 10, 2023

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Another Friday ‘hello’, friends- how is time moving so fast? To be honest, my soul is quiet this week. Like many of you, I’ve been helplessly watching the tragedy of 22,000 lives lost in the Turkey and Syria earthquake and wondering when, just when will some folks suffering cease? It feels like any small talk about my week I put here would be hollow and self-absorbed. I want this newsletter to uplift your spirits, but it’s also increasingly important to me as an artist and a person to sit with the sorrows which we all partake in to varying degrees as part of our human experience.

So tonight, under the countryside dark skies and glowing moon, I offer the night my solemn silence and think of those 22,000 souls lost. My thoughts become a little bird that flies overhead and sees those still buried in rubble and barely breathing, sees the hands that desperately dig through rocks and bleed, sees those wandering the streets still in obvious shock while journalists ask them for soundbites, sees the relatives who keep vigil and wait for miracles. The bird of my mind also flies over Ukraine and sees civilian people hiding underground almost a full year since war began and living in fear of tomorrow and she flies over so many other places experiencing war and oppression. Like the swallow in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Happy Prince’, my wee bird also sees the little sorrows closer to home, she flies past the windows of neighbours whose heating and lighting has run out, whose food is gone, whose mother and father are falling apart, whose children are in emotional distress and the help not coming. Grant me the grace to not be one who looks away or crosses the street to avoid the sorrow of others, but forgive me when I fail.

I tried and tried to say more this week but perhaps this silent observation under the stars is enough for today.

Start with a colour

My tiny hope offering. When the realities of collective or personal suffering turn into depression or burnout for me, I have developed strategies that are akin to what I do when I’m creatively stuck and that could be characterised with the phrase ‘Start with a colour’. When I’m creatively stuck or looking to learn new things, I seem to go back to the single colour blue. Maybe I’ll study another artist like Chagall or the pre-Raphaelites or an illustrator I love, and I’ll just stick with blue for a while to have a chance to concentrate on what it is about the other elements such as tonality or subject matter or line quality etc that speaks to me and might inform my own voice.

Similarly, if life has become too much and the sorrow is out-weighing the hope, I have learned to ‘start with a colour’, to basically give myself the grace of simplifying things for a while and picking one or two things to succeed at until the energy returns. I have definitely experienced those life periods where just getting up and washing your face feels victorious and, if that’s where you are at just now, please imagine my wee bird of compassion on your own windowsill, keeping you company until brighter days return. Can you ‘start with a colour’ too? Can you let your sorrow become poetry or drawings or ink spills on a page or just a noise or movement that rises from that elemental place that wants to bring you back to life?

Bless each of you who happen to stumble across my silly corner of the internet. I don’t know your lives or your pain and I know that so much is hidden, but I hope that somehow my daft wee doodles or words bring a shred of comfort and you know someone is thinking of you. I’ve grown to understand that sometimes an image that may say one thing to me may say something else entirely to you, so I embrace the mystery of that offering.

A song for the day, “Swallow” from Spell Songs.