Whine

I am feeling whiney today. Must be the clouds. I am tired and dismayed at how difficult it is to get to a place where I feel safe creatively and then how easy it is to fall off that space. Which is weird because when I'm there it's like a grounded giant field and it doesn't ever feel like I could fall off. But then, that's the weird nature of being in God, is it not? Whenever I am in communion with him/her I never feel I could step even a centimetre away. An hour later, my thoughts have me situated in a weedy piece of industrial wasteland next door to a nuclear power plant somewhere far away than where I was before.

And yet Winston Churchill's speech to university students remains one of my favourites: He got up, students expectant, and speeched in its entirety: "Never give up. Never give up. Never, ever, ever, ever give up." And then sat back down.

Sometimes it pays to just cut the bullshit and call stuff for what it is. All of these flights and flutters and removals and blocks are ALL fear.

Until I get back to feeling safer I do not write my story. I cannot continue to write a first draft until I am feeling free. (I am getting there; it is a powerful place; it draws me on, despite being faithless that anything I am doing will get me back there. And yet everything I am doing is also powerful even though it feels weak and stupid and pissy).

And so I come in to my story through the back door. Started painting a mandala last night which was nice. Tonight I hope to stick back all of the snapped off bits of hair from the clay bust that I removed in a fit of pique the other day.

(Pique. Now, there's a word that does not really sound the way it feels. Pique sounds too fluffy, as if there is custard in there somewhere and when I experience pique, it's all spiky and made out of tetanus-inducing bits of scrap metal.)

I snapped off the bits of hair because a couple of bits came off accidentally, and rather than glue them back on (the piece is leather hard and I don't think I'm going to get it fired) I snapped all of them off in some sort of self-sabotage. But it didn't work because now some of the pieces snapped off too high, revealing the fact that instead of fashioning ears for my piece I just made lumps because hair was to cover them.

I really have this expectation somewhere in my mind that things should always go smoothly and when they don't it's because I'm failing. When really, it's just because things never really do go smoothly in the perfectionistic sort of way that I expect them too. It's called life.

Ahhhh, expectancy. Please come back and smother my expectations.