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Tuesday 25 September 2012

September

The cool dark evening holds my thoughts for once. After the busyness of work I have found a time to sit in the summerhouse and welcome a time of peace and reflection. I haven’t been here much this year and the summer has been a time for doing many things and not much has inspired me to keep my journal or to take time out for formal writing. Now the nights seem to have drawn in quickly and the feeling that warm summer days - what few we had - are now a thing of the past.

Writing, for me, is about being inspired by something. Tonight I have the light of a candle flame and a gentle breeze brushing through the trees to give a sense of peace and calm after a long day in front of my computer screen getting artwork ready to print. Places inspire me. My summerhouse inspires me, unless I am driven back indoors by the cold. Here I am detached from all that I have in the home and at work. Usually I will write in my sketchbook, but today I have decided to compose directly onto my laptop mainly as a disciplinary exercise. Here I am open to anything that I feel led to write about. Distractions are few and I can focus on the act of creativity in a space of my own.

In the past few weeks I have surrounded myself by odd bits of reading material: an online subscription to ‘Resurgence Magazine’; two books - ‘The Spell of the Sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human-word’  by David Abram; ‘Deep Ecology - living as if nature mattered’ by Bill Devall; and the ‘Economist’ magazine. I am trying to get my brain thinking again and so looking for things that bring ideas into my focus rather than just dipping into the internet in an unstructured way.

Trying to live a spiritual life isn’t that easy. In some ways I think there are three paths that I could follow. Firstly there is the ‘supernatural’ type of path that has a deep sense of connection to an otherness that could take the form of any type of spiritual awareness of other beings, entities, powers or happenings. My Christian background has seen much focus on this and subsequent meetings with other people have also shown me how people view a more tangible spiritual world in other contexts too. Secondly, and a path that I find more easy to follow because I can identify with it more is a ‘personal development and well-being’ sort of path that looks more at how the person fits within the world around themselves. The supernatural element is not seen as obvious but yet not denied as it seems to account for a more mysterious, poetic, natural, observational and mystic approach. Thirdly - give up, grab hold of the ‘God delusion’ and forget about trying to touch the non-existant. This seems so tempting at times!

I want to carry on. I feel there is more for me to contribute and to learn about than I can currently grab hold of and I don’t want to pass it all by. There are genuine people out there who want to follow a path for no reason other than to better themselves, to find a place on this fragile earth, to gain a sense of well-being and to find a way of dealing with all of humanities successes and failings.

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