RAMBLINGS: 2017

Hi artist friends!

Lately I keep having this recurring thought about my own death. Bear with me, I'm going somewhere with this. :)

It started, I think, during my last visit to St Ives in Cornwall, on a trip to see sculptor Barbara Hepworth's home. She had such a beautiful garden, abundant with tropical plants, winding paths and hidden corners, her smooth, curvaceous creations at every turn, and in one corner is her studio. You can't go in, but you can look through the wall of windows and see the work she left behind, uncompleted, surrounded by tools.

Looking through that window, at all the work Hepworth never completed and never would, felt strangely poignant. Obvious perhaps, but whenever any of us go, we're not going to be 'done'. We're going to leave projects half completed, paintings unfinished, emails in drafts, to do lists with tasks yet to be crossed off, maybe dishes in the sink, perhaps a journal or even a book without a conclusion.

At first I found that thought quite shocking somehow. The enormity of the difference between being here and not being here, the suddenness of the shift, felt too overwhelming to grasp. Actually it still does, and I suspect it always will. Life is nothing if not a mystery after all.

But it's been gradually working on me, sinking in, showing me things. After a series of occurrences and aha moments lately, I've adopted the word 'experience' as a kind of talisman. It's not my word for the year, but does seem to be supplementing it somehow.

Whenever I feel unsure, afraid, reluctant, or unable to decide about something, I hear the word 'experience' in my mind, and it pops me right back to the here and now, to what's in front of me, to life, and me living it. I'm nowhere else, I'm here, and this is what's going on.

I can choose to experience it as fully as possible, or I can stay up in my head, telling myself stories about what's happening instead of being here living it. Because whatever is happening right now, is life. It's here and happening whether I'm engaged in it or lost in my head. And the more I participate, the better my experience.

That word experience has become as close to a magic wand as I'll probably ever get. It brings instant clarity. It makes choices easy {or easier}, and more often a yes. {Because I'm here, and this is happening, and what else is there, and one day I won't be here to say yes or no.} And even better, it's revealing every single thing as both more significant and less important. Everything in the physical world is passing through; I can experience it as it does {whether that's in joy or sadness}, or I can fight it and get stuck in endless thought loops that aren't even true.

Perhaps I was just ripe for this real-eyes-ation. Perhaps it's a secret everyone knows and no one told me. ;) {I realise meditators the world over will be going, 'duh', right about now.}

But now, when I think about how the day I move onto whatever's next I'll be leaving behind probably a stack of unfinished paintings, {and, if I don't get on with it} an incomplete and unpublished second book, and so much more 'in media res', I find it's helping me to be here and now more fully. I'm experiencing life - and not just the 'big' things but the tiny day to day moments no one knows about and are quickly forgotten - with greater depth and richness.

And finally, it's showing me how very ok it is not to finish things. Because there will always be tasks not yet done, emails unread, things not tied up with a neat bow and filed alphabetically. That's the nature of life, not a failing on our part.

How might life feel different, how might we experience it, if we allowed things to be unfinished, perhaps indefinitely? If the guilt was removed from the paintings we never completed and can't seem to find the desire to? If we just did what was here in front of us and did it fully, allowing it to be what it was without imposing rules about its value in any state?

Sometimes thinking about death frightens me still. The unknown of it is powerful, the more so for being unknowable until we each go there ourselves, whatever we hope or wish or believe. But it's also giving me a more interesting life.

To the unfinished projects, and allowing them to be exactly what they are,

Tara

..........................................

These wise words of hers really made me think about all the bad/sad and not so glad moments/years that I have had, even the present time living in the UK where I am not really happy and don't really want to be here and it just isn't my home - but if I think of it as an "experience" rather and actually try and live in the moment and live through the sad/bad days and let them wash over me, at least I am living instead of just being here and living like a robot with my head and heart still in South Africa. Not sure if that really makes sense, but for some sanity lets just hope so. Not sure.....??