Creating from the blue warm heart

part 3: how we create is who we are

Hello friends, familiar and new, and welcome to a house in a hamlet in a forest. I’m Jan and I hold spaces for those on journeys of transformation. I believe story is powerful and that the earth offers healing through our daily connection and herbal allies. My Sunday posts are always free and you are so welcome here. Let’s create a little alchemy together.

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The story I want to write and the story I want to live are always aspirational. We're creatures — flawed, fragile, sensitive, vulnerable... But, as I ended the last letter in this series:

The heart that breaks open is permeable to all of life.

Suffering finds most of us at some point in life, but as Katherine May says in her brilliant Wintering, sadness, like happiness, may be a skill. How do we feel our way through it? How do we emerge and making something new of it? Where are the moments of transformation?

I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation

Susan Sontag wrote in her diary on 4th November 1971, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh.

We've just had the Vernal Equinox. Alban Eilir in the Druid Celtic Calendar. It's a moment of poise, the light briefly balanced as we head towards the longest day. There is something gracious about the evenness of day and night, light and dark. And all around us the world is coming to life. All around is there is transformation.

What are you leaving behind in the earth this Spring — perhaps dreams or plans that need longer to germinate or you are not sure of or rhythms of Winter that don’t work for you as the earth warms…?

What have you sheltered through the winter that you want to carry into the Spring? They might be small moments of epiphany, dreams, imaginings, creative projects, ways of relating to the world or particular people, habits that serve you well…

What new story do you want to blossom into?

Suppose that we said yes to a single moment, then we have not only said yes to ourselves, but to the whole of existence. For nothing stands alone, either in ourselves or in things; and if our soul did but once vibrate and resound with a chord of happiness, then all of eternity was necessary to bring forth this one occurrence—and in this single moment when we said yes, all of eternity was embraced, redeemed, justified and affirmed.

The Will to Power: Selections from the Notebooks of the 1880s (translated by R. Kevin Hill and Michael A. Scarpitti).

A joyous affirmation on the possibility of becoming a new story is perhaps not what we expect to read from Nietzsche. But this ability to say yes to those cusp moments, those turning points that can slip away so quickly and on which our lives are build, is vital.

I'm currently working on a project that hangs on such turning points. Asking myself how moments so small, so slight, so alchemical, can change everything.

I have been weaving together fragments of grief and numinous, memory and ghosts. Tracing the threads of an overpowering calling that brought me to the forest, to a relationship with a patch of earth that I am not indigenous to, yet experience as ‘home’. At the heart of this tapestry are liminal moments so fleeting that I might have blinked and missed them; small epiphanies that came with no fanfare, that stretch back to earliest memories, each leading me towards an unexpected elderhood in a foreign country as a herbalist holding space for writers and creators on their own transformative journeys. And wondering how to sustain this in a world of too much darkness and loss.

The questions I ask those whose writing work I mentor or who I am working with on their herbal journeys are —

What story do you want to write?

What story do you want to live?

How do you want to feel?

So often the answers are in the spaces between and beyond our ordinary, rushed perception. They are in the spaces where we say yes to those single moments that are in turn saying yes to the whole of existence. They are in the spaces were we give our creativity time and power as makers and artists and creators always need to.

I recently read Derek Jarman: Protest -- a retrospective from the Irish Museum of Modern Art to mark 25 years since his death. His art ranged across so many genres, done with Renaissance-person visionary flair at a time when the world, then as now, was closing in for anyone who was 'different'.

Jarman had every opportunity to be an insider, to become a big commercial success, but instead told truth to power, kept experimenting and embraced his queerness with an intelligent and distinctive iconoclasm. He wanted to imagine a different story -- an England beyond Empire and monoculture. The first section of the book (on his paintings) opens with a quote from Sartre about our responsibility for one another, our inherent connection.

His images are full of symbolism — he immerses in a project of being present, of making meaning, paints a version of Caravaggio's 'The Entombment of Christ', his own called 'Irresistable Grace' as he makes the film, Caravaggio, writes poetry...

Blue of my heart

Blue of my dreams

Slow blue love

Of delphinium days

(Blue — the film — 1993)

How we create is not who we are for all artists and writers and creatives. It's an aspiration to return to again and again. It's a choice. And when it's made it creates alchemy. It creates a different story.