Soul restoration

Fixing things up, repairing the damage, bringing it back to life, this is the work of restoration. How do you go about restoring the soul? The heart of our spirit is like a walled secret garden in need of our attention. Vines grow wild, flower beds are filled with weeds, the path is strewn with the leaf litter of many seasons. Where do you start? Clean up is a way into the work, a little raking here and sweeping there, pull a weed or two, find the beautiful stonework beneath the overgrowth. Each action fuels the next. Discoveries of forgotten toys, lost in childhood and benches uncovered with views of the sky reappearing. Pathways are cleared and patterns re-emerge. Our soul is a place of refuge as boundary walls and gates protect us from unwanted intrusions. A well-tended garden anchors us in the midst of life's chaos.

Clay under my fingernails

It is only when my hands touch clay that my mind is quiet. The voices of the day, the week, the year, those that seem to never stop echoing down from a distant past, go still. They all recede to a level I cannot hear and with permanent hearing damage, that is not so far as I would like. And in that absence of verbal assault, I can think, I can rest, I can become one with an earthen material of ancient origin. It is not unlike sleep, but in the studio, I get to experience life without the need for dreams. I become the dream, the soft rise of inspiration from the unconscious layers of my mind, embedded with the spirit. I have no dealines, no emails, no demands of time or appointments. Life is rich and full in a timeless state of connection with the matertial and the divine.

Breaking the dam

A name, a sound, a texture seen in a light cast by a late afternoon sun. These are what it takes. The unexpected, the moment of insight after scales have fallen with the dried mud made from spittle and dust. Yes, I have been blind these past few months, unable to see words worth writing, thoughts worth sharing, ideas worth investigating. For a reason unknown to me, I had to write today, tonight, I cannot sleep until I find new words, new phrases, new reasons to take the time to shape the invisible language of thoughts. A smell not easily indentified, waifs through the open door to the upper porch. The moon has not yet risen, the heat lingers from the new summer. There is a kind of simple release in the connecting of words. It is a way of health, a path down which I have not traveled in many weeks. I feel the damage from negligence, from ignoring the pain, from the damed up silence leaking through the cracked reservoir. It is like tears falling in rain, unnoticed in the flood, but stinging like alchohol as they squeeze out from under closed lids. Unseen: the way of sadness. A new sculpture finishing in the studio, the head upturned, blackened nose and mouth with its stain running down to the chest. The ladder made of damaged branches tied with twine not strong enough to hold. A piece of the lingering sadness that moves at the deepest levels of the unconscience. At the still point of the turning world, there the dance is. Ever still and in stillness ever moving. The way.