Life Small ~ Life Big ~ Life Neutral
I feel like I have been conducting an experiment for the past few months.
How to find a way in such to live that outside job work—its structure, purpose, and easy fulfillment—harmonizes with a space for art and making projects and learning, learning, learning: soul nourishment. And enough space for relationships and sleep.
In late March exhaustion I watched the Howards End miniseries.
A dream. Well-made. Filled with art, intellectuals, jobs, and class.
Does that happen to you? A work of art shows up in your life at the exact moment you need it.
Howards End was a work of art I needed.
Naturally, I latched on. So many questions. So many tingling interconnected strings to follow through the woods. A faint resonant harmony echoed of answers whole and hearty.
The ending of the show did not satisfy.
I read the book from the library. Another new development: I can now fall asleep while I read on a couch after work. I have never fallen asleep while reading before in my life and even stopped reading books at night years ago because it woke up my brain too much. But to doze while reading something wonderful in the lull of the afternoon can be enjoyable. I stayed awake enough to read all the way through. This novel was a glass of sweet spring water to read and oxygenated art in daily life.
On my way home from work one day, the Fates’ introduction from Any Way the Wind Blows played in my head. Above the trees was the sky pale … spring … blue. I felt like Leonard Bast the walking six miles home from work.
And it happened.
A sung-through musical adaptation of Howards End. An educational experience: how to adapt anothers’ work, to take apart the gears and tinker with a well-structured story and finally put it together again in an even more distilled form. The natural outflow of a month of hyper-fixation on building independent musicals in the winter. An opportunity to try and learn how Dave Malloy adapted and worked together Great Comet and how Anais Mitchel wrote and formed Hadestown. Music theory! Liberty of London dresses and the Reform / Artistic / Aesthetic dress movement. Lighting? Trees to glean from Bread and Puppet? Blocking finally clicked in my brain! How to piece together a satisfying & cohesive set list?
The natural outflow of my love for an interest is to make a project from it.
A T-shirt, a short film, or an exercise like this. After years or months or hours.
I don’t care so much about having made a thing … as the delight of being absorbed while you tinker and listen and rearrange a piece.
It may not happen anytime soon. (There is so much to learn.) It may never happen at all. (Life is a vapor and a gift.) But like … I feel like it might happen at some point. I feel like it could be really fun.
I also recognize, more and more, that I often reclude into thoughts (like a Schlegel?) and making work I can control. Um. I guess I am learning this too.
After I wrote the words up there for this week …
A mentor said a few sentences to me that sliced clear.
She gave me two orders.
This stage—this age—this year. Mentors who give the same no-nonsense direction. Refusal of the call. Permission to be big. A woman afraid.
I agree with most of what I wrote above for this issue.
Now I see where the true beauty of a “small life” is being used to wrap over a life of static to avoid the fear of ahead. Maybe there can be no small without the big.
Time to listen. Time to pray. Time to plan, and go.
You could call it ‘flow’, but I prefer ‘absorption’ because ‘flow’ attracts suggestions of ‘being present’, ‘intensity’, and ‘proneness to flow’ and other contemporary examples of psychobabble. But finding yourself absorbed in something is lovely and uncomplicated and jargon-free; it’s when you are not rushing, just completely enveloped in a cocoon of concentration which is enjoyable because afterwards you notice that you’ve also been thinking other thoughts, wandering through time and space, and having conversations in your head.
—Jane Brocket, Yarnstorm: Absorbtion
Quote: 🏹📜🌻
"Better to take one small step in the right direction than run a mile in the wrong one.”
—Agatha Swanburne ~ Maryrose Wood