The Wild Nun: The Path of Illness

For a few short years I thought I knew the path I was walking. 

Now, that time of grace long gone, the way is not so clear. 

I keep walking anyway. 

* 

Every now and then there appear bright spots in the gloom, gifts from Source that bloom into being, and my wellspring fills and then overflows. 

These blessed moments nourish my dark depths during spells of creative and spiritual drought, those unavoidable elements of the climate of chronic illness.

 

Waratahs in the mist

Words and images from my Instagram project @the_wild_nun

The Wild Nun: Foundations

I am starting slowly, from a low-to-the-ground place.

*

The future grows from the ground of the past —

The past is mother to the future, to possibility, while it holds us steadily, solidly, in the present —

It is the foundation that cannot be denied —

Only honoured and shown gratitude for the many lessons that push us onwards towards ourselves.

Tree, Merrion Square Park, Dublin, July 2005

*

If it is the journey and not the destination, then it is the longing and not the attainment.

I must tend to my longings, feed them, encourage them to grow from the ground of my being, so in turn they nourish me.

*

It’s not easy being a late-bloomer, often a complete non-bloomer, and occasionally dying right back down to the roots to spend time hidden and safe in the underworld, to get some good old composting done before the next furtive emergence.

The world is not always understanding of such changeability, of an adherence to inner seasons that cannot be tamed and forced into production on demand.

It’s not easy but I can’t be rushed. I have to take my own sweet time dancing with the invisible.

Words and images from my Instagram project @the_wild_nun

Sacred Mountain

I’ve been playing with this idea for the past month, and being constantly frustrated in my attempts to bring it into being. I wanted to get it right, to have it be what it cannot help but be, and avoid starting paintings I couldn’t bring to fruition. My energy is limited, thus I wanted to get from beginning to end with as little twists in the road as possible.

I tried drawing slightly different designs, adding or subtracting details, and pondering colours or a lack of them. Yet nothing seemed right, the image thwarting my efforts to define it once and for all.

The lack of progress* (a word I hate, but I’ll leave it there) was causing me to fall into an all too familiar mindset: 

The why bother? perspective. 

The my work is not so important point of view. 

The it’s all too hard stance.

It’s a good thing I’m stubborn, and that feelings do change. I decided that enough was enough and just got started, simplifying the image to its bare essentials, and reducing the size. 

It’s not entirely as I wished it to be, but I feel the elements I left out are not yet ready to manifest themselves, and I respect that. They will feed future work.

And I need to remember to be brave, to just play and explore. That I can, and must, silence the perfectionist voice and be content with whatever emerges.

The main inspiration came from this quote:

… Silbury Hill in Wiltshire is an immense conical mound, dating from Stone Age times, that resembles a birth-cone. Sacred mountains in general are of this form, with the tip missing, which is supposed to be the place where the earthly meets the other world. This can have a literal meaning is one takes the ‘other world’ to be the place where everyone was grown through the stages of gestation, up from the single cell through the animal series to the human baby. Everyone is then born through the birth-cone, or ‘axis of the universe’. In the emblems the sacred mountain is accompanied by a world tree haunted by serpents, and a spring of water. The shaman may climb such a tree to meet the gods … (Penelope Shuttle & Peter Redgrove, The Wise Wound: Menstruation & Everywoman, 1978/1986, p. 180)

This image, I hope, contains both mountain and world tree; a spine-like fissure as the axis of the universe; and the marriage of earth with water/rain.

*A better alternative would be process.

Sacred Mountain, ink and felt tip pen (2020)

Wise Words: Axis Mundi (The Union of Spiritual and Material Energies)

Making is a spiritual search. When the artist makes he or she is identified with the will of the spirit. But the artist is also identified with the will of the earth because the end of this spiritual search is to find and press the forms from his or her imagination into physical matter. Art is the union of spiritual and material energies.

(Meinrad Craighead, The Sign of the Tree: Meditations in Images & Words, Artists House: London, 1979, p. 164)

Axis Mundi, by Meinrad Craighead

Solitude

Perhaps this work speaks for itself. Isolation was on my mind, as it has been for most of us lately. However, it was really prompted by beginning to reread a book about the Symbolists, which mentioned the influence of Mantegna on many French and English Symbolist artists, especially his depiction of rock formations, and ‘tendency to load every rift with ore’.* And this image came, almost complete, to my mind’s eye. 

Yet, though it may look like an image of isolation, for me it is more about solitude, which has, potentially, a more positive and fertile element to it—a meeting with the hidden self, thriving beneath our everyday consciousness, while some mysterious source feeds from above.

I was not sure I would complete this image. Once again nothing was going right. But I persisted, and as I (un)painted, I came to an understanding with it.

For anyone who is unaware, all of my art is available as stationary and other products via Redbubble.

Solitude, watercolours, gouache and acrylics (2020)

*Edward Lucie-Smith, Symbolist Art, Thames and Hudson: London, 1972, p. 12

Beauty for Strange Times

A few weeks ago I felt a strong call to withdraw from social media and to turn within. I was looking forward to the pursuit of quiet, slowness, and inner work. 

Then the pandemic crisis escalated and many of us were forced into some form of isolation. Though social isolation is not unfamiliar to me (as I am sure is the case for many people who live with chronic illness or disability), it felt wrong to cut myself off from the world. As torn as I am about the value and healthiness of the internet, I can see that it’s performing an important social function in these uncertain times.

And paradoxically, now that I am actually forced to stay at home, I feel as if I’ve been called back into the world, and I’ve been paying all the more attention to beauty. I’ve been sharing quite a lot of photos on social media, of birds, and the moods of the mountains, as well as quotes and art and things I have made.

So I thought I’d leave some of those images here, as gifts for anyone who is online, looking for beauty, and some respite from the anxiety of these strange times.

The potent medicine of water: for calmness in turbulent times … and ducks!

Superb fairy wrens: a female; and a male growing into his adult feathers.

Beautiful morning skies.

Little garden beastie (an eastern water skink) making the most of the autumn sun.

A strange line in the clouds.

Mountains, and mountainous cloud formations.

It’s mushroom season!

A watery start to April.

Mountain devil in flower.

A satin bowerbird who was a little annoyed at me.

And cockatoos, looking smug as always.

Whence She Grew

It took three attempts to birth this image, but here she is.

My first attempt was short-sighted, for I quickly realised that, as the snakes and tree roots are quite stylised, the tree should be so too. I rethought things, came up with a new drawing, and began painting again. However, I did not prepare for the second attempt with the same sequence of colours that I used on the first, and was not happy with the result. So, with as much patience as I could muster, I began yet again …

This is, perhaps, a valuable lesson. I’m often so eager to be working on something that I have a tendency to rush into an idea without thinking it through sufficiently. From now on I’ll try to slow down.

Winterlight

This week I am resting after being away from home for a couple of weeks, so I thought I would show you some of what I saw in that somewhat different place: the winterlight of afternoon, the intimations of spring as the wattle begins to flower, the small beauties of the bush; and the extraordinary book I have been very slowly rereading, trying to let its wisdom soak into my flesh so that I can begin to awaken to the sensuous world once more.

(Apologies for the quality of some of the photos. I didn’t have my camera with me, so all of these images were taken with my phone.)

The efflorescence of the hairpin banksia, Banksia spinulosa

Prickly Moses or juniper wattle, Acacia ulcifolia

Golden wattle, Acacia longifolia, breaking into bloom

Probably a species of boronia

The dried efflorescence and seed pods of the Old Man Banksia, Banksia serrata