Just where I am

For the last few days I have been on the edge, of a series of cluster migraines.
Sometimes it’s a case of bang they are there, nothing to do but ride it out, at others it’s the gentle nagging that manifests in over sensitivity, a distortion of light, and a stepping just out of phase with reality. Here there is a vague tension and an inability to get what seems clear to me out into the world in any way that is concise let alone coherent. Even what I am writing today has taken three times longer and needed constant editing.

It can take some time with these to realise that something is going on. Funnily enough as much as the pain and the night vomiting are a down side, there are moments in the lead up and wind down, which I value.

Last night I interviewed Steve Taylor for a local radio programme (more on that when I am more with it). Listening back to it I found myself to be waffly and vague (one of my least great moments). I was also aware at the dinner and meeting I attended afterward of falling into that place where it is as if I have stepped out of phase with reality, I am aware of what is going on but it is as though it is being played out before me. Insights occur here and intuitions.

Something else odd happens in this place for me, it is a place of great inspiration. Here is where I am called to paint, not just icons (which require so much precision and form) but where my wilder paintings occur. This is where my fingers are used as much as my brush, where unearthly landscapes, pained portraits and images of Mary falling into the arms of shadowed angels appear on the canvas. This is where words fill my mouth to bursting; tumbling out in what rarely at the time makes sense but certainly feels right.

These paintings, these poems, will be the raw beginning to something new.

On the internet I see them called migraine auras. Hildegard of Bingen is the Patron Saint of these as she suffered both migraines and visions. On this day I see people such as Salvador Dali, and Georgia O'Keeffe also had these times and how they were a great source of inspiration for them. Not that I am as talented as them

With such Saints and mentors as these this is an interesting place to be… now I wonder how church will look today in such a space.

Nothing profound today simply a statement of where I am…

In the Fertile Dark sits the Dream

It’s been a month where everything has raced. Over the last couple of days I have fallen into the world of Harry Potter. I am discovering at such times when I am propelled along by the story that I miss an awful lot. A rollicking good tale is all very well but the share pace can mean that the subtly, the moments of significant impact, are lost as we are suddenly thrust forward into the next drama.

Now to a point with Harry Potter this is intentional. The constant hunting and being hunted doesn’t allow one to slow down- keeping people transfixed for 600 pages with excitement and danger (this is an art in itself). What I am noticing now, is that I want to go back to places where I was momentarily moved to the tissue box and absorb them and the impact of them slowly, to allow the story to unfold in its fullness. And indeed discover what I missed and how that effects the telling of the story.

Just as I respond to the inevitable Monday morning question of “How was your weekend?” with “it didn’t really feel like I had one” I find such pace, such over stimulation and the need to “fill” space/time damaging.

Is this how I approach God? What does it do to my faith to indulge in such a fast paced, once only examination of something which is precious beyond all measure.

Recently I was at a talk by Bosco Peters when the comment made was: “We searched for meaning, the danger with young people today is that they search for stimulation”.
Young people gently aside, I wonder if I indeed fall into that. I say I crave stillness but aside from painting (my blessed icon group) and small moments in the week, I find more often than not a desire for more “bigger, stronger, faster, better?

At the moment I have two assignments due! (It’s okay Meg of course you can study, teach, be a wife, and work full time toughen up). One of the assignments asks that we find a passage in the First Testament that moves us. I find it intriguing that at a time when I feeling like a Koala-Bear-on-acid, the passage that continually calls to me is the beginning of the creation story in Genesis

Translation1
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

Translation2
First this: God created the Heavens and Earth—all you see, all you don't see. Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness. God's Spirit brooded like a bird above the watery abyss.

Translation 3
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The earth was barren, with no form of life; it was under a roaring ocean covered with darkness. But the Spirit of God was moving over the water.

This moment, this beginning of the greatest story ever told,

stills me in the madness. Here in the cauldron before creation is where as an artist I am drawn, where I find breath, where my dreams, my creations take form. And here there is no place in the inky blackness for the hunt or the hunted- for the manicness of life, only room to float under the surface of the inky blackness as the Holy Spirit hovers above me, igniting me as she goes.

In the fertile dark sits the dream
Eternally begotten of the Father

it flows through the edge of sleep
Wraps us in still deep pools of possibility

Such places reshape our waking
Our faces forever changed in bathroom mirrors