Reflections, again

And as I sit, drinking a cup of coffee, I permit my art works to emerge unbidden into the light from the well of reflections. I think back:

In my work with communities, lasting from 2002 until 2014, I offered myself in service to other humans directly, as an agent of change and manifestation. I brought into life buildings and venues, I ran bookshops and gave performances. There was theatre and laughter and music. We published - made ourselves and our ideas public. Lessons came, but they were yet to be learned.

Then, in the autumn I retreated to the mountains and it came to me that I belonged on a boat, so I bought a boat in 2015 and began another life. A year had passed when I chanced upon some training in Yorkshire, to become what I call now a Ferryman, or death companion; a person who walks with, bears witness to, those who are dying. I made plans. 

But I was also dying. Not a mortal death, but a metaphysical, spiritual death. I needed to kill off the parts of myself that were not me, the parts given by society  to all of us that block the emergence of our true selves. In the summer of 2017 I returned from a trip to America and knew something had changed, perhaps I’d come back from the brink. I began my first pilgrimage, by boat, to Yorkshire, to train. It took me a year.

And in that year, along the canals of England, I learned how to listen, learned what listening was for. And as I arrived in Yorkshire, in extremely unlikely circumstances, having almost sank in the Manchester Ship Canal, the training no longer seemed necessary. I had already learned what I needed: that my work was always going to be among not the dead, but the living. Specifically, those who struggle to be alive, just as I had been. Something had shifted: I was ready to step into potency once again. Art works began to appear, but this time they were mine.

In 2018, From ever moving waters, I moved to the solid stillness of the chalk downs of Hampshire with my Maggie, gardener, artist and love of my life. My land legs came and by 2019 the art work truly began to arrive. Paintings, poetry, sculptures, videos, music, sound. Food became art. Walking became art. The work began to enter my dreams, inhabit me. Somehow, in the mysterious universe I’d found something to say, something was speaking to me and it wouldn’t be quiet any more.