I can never quite decide where my comfort level is when it comes to how autobiographical to be in my public writing. In equal parts, I crave a private life but am driven by a desire to understand humanity and creativity, and I know that the treasure I seek is hidden in the dark matter of other people’s stories and in us being able to say the things that we usually only whisper into the night. I’m not good at much but I can be still with those things. So let’s start with an easy biographical detail and see if we can go deeper…
This week I had the absolutely sublime joy of joining two tour dates with Mary Chapin Carpenter, Julie Fowlis and Karine Polwart, whose album art I made for their new collaboration ‘Looking for the Thread’. It’s not often you can be writing about singers you admire, as I did last week, and having tea with them the week after. I still feel so stunned and undeserving when such magic floats in my direction, but I’m eternally grateful for the friendship of Karine in particular, who blesses me on multiple levels with her encouragements big and small, in song and in person.
I sat with different friends in the dark, in the glow of the silver-blue and purple light, and we all released tears together as the achingly-beautiful music washed over us like a balm. Tales of wild salmon, migratory indigo bunting birds and lonely abandoned satellites filled the air, along with acknowledgement of the darkness we are living in, the love too and the threads that tie us all together.
Each woman sang and spoke with a tenderness that made you lean in and together their sound was otherworldly. I wish I could take the very tangible compassion, friendship and safety of that experience and spread it around, and I hope that each person who saw it carries a bit of it with them to their next interactions. To be able to communicate such tenderness in a sometimes brutal world is a wonderful thing.
Not even a week before this, I hosted an event at my first ever literary festival, Alnwick Book Festival, with support from two colleagues, Gavin and Victoria. This room was filled with a different and equally beautiful energy; the joyful buzz of sixty people making glittery fish and mermaids to improvise a puppet show, against the beautiful panoramic views of Alnwick Gardens. Again, if only I could capture that energy and spread it around…
These experiences put me in mind of one of the wishes/intentions I made earlier when I didn’t really know exactly what my goals should be anymore, and how it is coming to fruition without much striving. (More here)
Terrible Truths
Maybe it’s just the state of the world or maybe it’s because I run a little on the bittersweet side at times and have a sort of expansive mind for noticing and holding a lot of things at once but, in these beautiful moments, I am always tenderly and acutely conscious of the opposite forces and of those who are not able to participate. Something about the exquisite beauty brings the opposite into relief, it wells up in my chest like two forces together.
I think it’s also because having a social media platform of a size as an artist offers a strange little vantage point to the stories of others. I receive little messages from a lot of people across the world, quite often sharing stories that are connected to a painting of mine. I also connect with lovely people who are really making light in dark places too; serious situations like fundamentalist regimes that restrict personal freedoms or situations of more localised injustice or pain, like chronic illness and isolation, or the long-reaching spirals of grief. Just being a witness to a story for a few minutes when it presents itself feels important and feels enough.
I know that every struggle is not mine to solve, but neither does it feel right to simply look away. The imminent five year anniversary of the first lockdown puts my mind back to the time of my own period of suffering, when the pandemic was added to by divorce , the breakdown of home, bereavement, miscarriage, catastrophic flooding destroying my life’s creative work and more. All I remember is a feeling like my spirit had abandoned me, the loss of imagination about the future and of putting one foot in front of the other, following the voices across the darkness of those gracefully saying ‘It will be ok eventually’. I remember too the art and music that soothed me, that continues to do so.
These biographical details just happen to be specific to me, but what they really speak to is the experience of helplessness, which is something many of us will face. Times are a lot better, I laugh and I feel so strong and free to be me now, but a lot still isn’t ok and the truth of it all is that I possibly cannot solve it all- I have tried, it isn’t about effort. Some injustices are external to me and not in my sphere of control, some wounds leave scars, some things cannot be fixed, or not today anyway.
One the greatest gifts a friend who has known me forever gave me was to calmly and matter-of-factly acknowledge aloud that the truth of some of it is just terrible, and it allowed me for once to leave that helplessness on the table and say nothing at all to avoid it. What really matters is that, in the beat after the acknowledgement, where you could just free-fall, they caught me with a hug and we laugh-cried it off together.
Hello Across the Darkness, Friend…
And that really brings me to the point of these threads that I am clumsily looking to tie together somehow this week. What if there’s just a lot we cannot fix? What if the cure isn’t coming? What if some things are fundamentally and irreversibly broken? What if justice isn’t served? And the one we cannot easily say that many of us are worrying about just under the surface, what if war is around the corner? What if the things we see happening to others already are coming for us soon?
I’m not asking the questions to catastrophise or to provoke anxiety- it’s quite the opposite. These are rhetorical questions that I’m not trying to ‘solve’. What I’m asking is, what if we were to sit down with our helplessness in the dark and quiet and ask it questions? What if we found those little spaces to say ‘I wish it wasn’t true’. And more than that, just as at the concert I have written of here, what if we found ways to hold each other and all of it in the dark together? What if we could not change it, but we could sing tenderly to one another about it? What if we could help one another hold our ground inside? What if the combination of friendship, community, compassion, creativity and nature could strengthen a sacred space in us; a deep stability that, no matter what actually comes at us next, we could hold back fear and hold each other instead?
I don’t have any answers (I do have some practices that I’ll share later because this is long and we’re all tired), but I’m finding value in simple willingness to hold an open heart and look upon matters of helplessness with compassion, rather than the fear that drives all of us apart and into our corners. Maybe we can do some of that together.
Here’s a wee tune Mary Chapin performed live this week that has been helping me hold an open heart today while I piece this wee newsletter together. It feels less sophisticatedly written than I’d like, but it’s feeling increasingly important to speak ideas of compassion into this world, however clunky.
This writing is not at all clunky. It’s addressing deep concerns and ways of living. There is some serious work—and play—ahead of us. 🪷
What if... we don't have to fix it all?...