Image from http://streetartlondon.co.uk

I didn’t realise how the art had disappeared from my life until I was faced with it’s reappearance. It stood on my doorstep three days ago looking dishevelled and hopeful and asked to come in. Art has aquamarine eyes. Did you know?

Where have you been? Did I tell you to go? I didn’t mean it. I didn’t recognise you when you came knocking before. I was afraid to embrace you fully. Afraid of what you unleash in me. It wasn’t really you I was afraid of. Who knew? I retained the essence of you, the scent that lingered on my skin. I could bottle it and call it quirky.

You look hesitant and uncertain. Will I invite you in? ALWAYS. How can I not? I haven’t felt whole without you. There has been something missing. My refusal to admit it has lessened us both. I have paid you lip service but it lacked integrity and power because I pushed you away and forgot that raw honesty you draw out of me.

I am unstoppered now. I can’t stop what’s pouring out of me like a river. One thing after another and another and another. The flow is relentless. My fingers ache from gripping a pen and can hardly bear to close my eyes for fear that I will miss something else. I ache with tiredness and yet within that is a core of ecstasy that I have found you again. “It’s like coming home” you said. For me too. It’s a melding, a joining, a transformation. The first time I found you, my life changed. Now I have unleashed a force inside me I don’t know how to control.

If art has a price, I will gladly pay it for the canvas of my life would be bland without it.

Those moments in between are without constraint or definition.

Because sometimes you just want to throw a few things in a car and head off into the unknown, with the stereo on loud and no idea where you’re going. Because those times when you do, you become completely free, unfettered by expectations or image. Because sometimes this is the only time when none of it matters and you can be purely and simply yourself when the biggest decisions are left, right or straight ahead. These are the times when you don’t have to BE anyone. You can sing along to the stereo out of tune, or you can stop pretending to sing out of tune and lift your voice and really go for it. You can throw off the suit, or if the urge really takes you throw one on. In the moments between here and there are sometimes the moments when you can really open yourself up and BREATHE until the everyday constraints fall away.

Sometimes it’s only the anonymity of being where nobody knows you that can open you up to express what normally hides inside you, because it’s a time when you’re not in a constant CHAIN REACTION. Sometimes the moments in between are the ones when you’re not fulfilling someone’s expectations of you, when you’re not playing a role, when you’re not being the mother, the daughter, the one people can turn to, the one that gets things done, the one who can make them laugh. These moments are the times when you can shed all that and just be what and whoever you want, whether that’s all of those things or none of them.

These moments are as vital to me as air. I will forgo new things, things I need, and jettison things I need to do because I need those hours where I’m not being forced into a shape. I feel like jelly finding its way out of the mould in a whole new shape. Maybe these moments are more necessary for me, while I feel that my inside and outside are too far apart, that my inside strains against my outside like clothes that are just too tight. I know that without these moments of freedom the seams will just burst. The moments when you can just BE are the moments when you see everything differently. Things melt away and it’s as though you can see clearly where you never realised it was hazy. It’s these in-between moments that give me the clarity to keep forging forwards when everything else feels so murky I wonder how I’ll ever find my way. It’s these moments that  widen my perspectives and have me grabbing a camera, these moments that hold their arms out to me and tell me to express myself. Sometimes the truths I find as a result of these fleeting instances of clarity that ASTOUND me, and I realise how wide open I am to hope, to experience, to vision and inspiration. It’s in these moments when the ordinary becomes the remarkable, the tedious becomes the astounding and the commonplace can be life-changing.

When I see how amazing the things are that I can create in these moments, it makes me wonder how and why I hold myself back but the lives we live  demand constraint and consequence, but when the urge grabs me and says ‘Come away with me, Free yourself.’ My only response is to say ‘consequences be damned’. Let me have that moment where I can open my soul to the whole wide world. Let me have another when the world opens up right back.

But I, being, poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
William Butler Yeats
He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Once upon a time in this life, I lived in the North. At first I hated it. It was big and brash and bold and was the opposite of everything I’d known, but I grew to love it. Its openness, its wildness, the people who opened their hearts before their mouths, and rarely let me sit alone without joining me just for the company. It was full of nooks and crannies to explore and places that were crying out to tell you their stories. Here are some of the places I miss…

Derwent Walk

Grey Street, Newcastle (Once voted the prettiest street in Britain by Radio 4)

Millennium Eye

The Tyne Bridge

Bamburgh Castle from the Beach

St Marys Lighthouse

Marsden Bay, home to the Marsden Grotto restaurant in the cliff face, and historic home to smugglers

Dunstanburgh castle at Craster (The world famous home of kippers)

Blanchland

Lindisfarne from the walkway

For some outstanding pictures of places I love, see Moods of the Northumberland Coast by Tony Hopkins. I bet you’ll fall in love with it too.

The leaden skies of winter

It would be fair to say that I am not a winter person. Not in the slightest, tiniest bit. I don’t like snow, I loathe the continual leaden skies and feeling of overwhelming misery and heaviness that comes with it, and I dislike having to put on nearly my entire wardrobe before beginning to feel anywhere approaching warm. No, winter is definitely not my season.

The last week has found me, most evenings, curled up in front of the fire, wrapped in a blanket, gloves and  a pair of thermal socks, reading a book. In a 17th century cottage in the middle of Somerset. Sounds idyllic, doesn’t it? Bloody glorious, I can tell you but somehow slightly less when it’s a necessity against the weather which is rendering my nose and fingers a purplish shade of blue and the thermostat in the kitchen reads 9 degrees celcius with the heating on full blast.

Nothing in winter is generous. Just as the leaves are stripped from the branches of the trees, winter strips you bare.

It pummels you viciously with the cold weather so that every breath you take is a fight for your lungs and leaves you without grace or elegance as the wind whips at you and makes your skin sting, and your feet slip and slide along the icy pavements. The sheer brutality of the weather combined with the achingly long nights make you want to turn your life aside and curl up in your bed until it has passed you by.

My days are a continual fight between my body, trying to conserve what energy I have  by encouraging me to sleep and huddle to keep myself warm and my modern lifestyle, which seems to demand I jettison my natural urges for hibernation and carry on regardless. As with all things, when there is an acute divergence between your lifestyle and the needs of your body, something somewhere has got to crack, and I have to say that I have a fine case of the winter grumps.

I’m tired, and cold and the energy that would I would usually be using for brighter, better and happier things is currently being used to keep me warm and awake. Does anyone from a hot climate want to adopt me for the winter?

Image courtesy of http://www.monastery.nl

An open missive to those of narrow mind and faint heart:

What did you hope to achieve in your determination to define? Did you hope to cut me down into smaller and smaller pieces until I was small enough not be a threat, so that you could label the microscopic pieces of me and examine them in the hope to understand my whole? Did you think you could stand there and make me LESS than I am? How can you not see that the blade of your scalpel is finer than you can see  and separates me in places you can’t identify. Can you not see that the very essence of what makes me up cannot be confined and mutilated like some vulgar science experiment?

I wonder if you see how your attemps to destroy only serve to strengthen? The cracks in the walls you gleefully cause are patched over and hold stronger as a result. The result is slightly morphed. Ever so slightly different. The resulting me recognises the weaknesses in me that you worked your ways into, insidiously, gleefully, vengefully and fortifies them, mending them in a way that changes me. I’m a constant mutation, evolving to meet you in every dimension, and this is why you can’t define me. I am never exactly the same from one moment to another. I am a result of you. Not in the way you would like to imagine but nonetheless, it is true. I could not be, would not be who I am without you. I am better as a result of coming face to face with the brutality of you. I and those like me are a magnified mirror to what surrounds us. Remember this the next time you try to hurl insults at us. You are doing no more than damaging yourselves. You can no more destroy us than you can nail jelly to the wall.

What is it about a life of boldness, of valour, of brightness and of hope that intimidates you? What is it that you see that makes you want to destroy it? Why are you afraid? It’s not me you’re afraid of, if only you’d have the courage to stand up and admit it. It’s seeing someone else BEING and living a big life and your innate fear that if you let go and followed your dreams, you couldn’t do it. Why not just fucking do it? Screw the fear. But no, this is your easier path.

Well, FUCK THAT!

This path, this life is not an easy way. It’s not cushioned, it’s not supported. When you fall over, it’s not just that you get grit in your knees but it compounds every single other time you fell over and got grit in your knees until getting up feels like a Herculean task. This sort of life throws you challenges that you couldn’t begin to dream of.

It strips you of all the things most people have when they start out life: all the soft illusions, the promises and the gentleness. No, you start out knowing the worst of people, the worst of things, and you heal from the ground up. Every wound you feel more deeply, and each pleasure takes you higher than you’ve ever known.

This sort of life is extreme, it’s boundless and it IS undefined. People like me, we’re unique and we’re fearless and we are more than you can know. Every sense we have is so acute as to be almost unbearable. We are wanton in our demand for emotion, intensity and experience. We go anywhere just to see, just to hear, just to touch. We need nothing more than a dream to set us on our way. We’re bright and bold and yearning for change. In fact we’re so damned impatient, we’re leading the charge. We’re warriors for a new way and we cannot be beaten. We don’t need props or costumes to BE. We simply are. We’d shine in a burlap sack. We don’t make things easy for other people or for ourselves and mostly couldn’t give a damn. We never expect anything of anyone else that we wouldn’t expect of ourselves.

We’re an open enigma – there for anyone who can break the code, but the code is complex and the codebreakers few and far between.