All Aboard

Thrilled to be joining in with The Floating as part of Bristol Biennial.

I will take part in an evening writing workshop aboard a boat on a journey with eleven other people in the Bristol harbour. Collaborative writing from the boat journey will then be published in an experimental way, along the harbourside, for other people to see over the week of the Bristol festival. 

Curated by - Conway and Young with Amy Spencer
About the artists
Conway and Young have been collaborating as graphic designers and lecturers since 2006, with a long-term interest in the relationship between people, environment and learning - they use design to engage people in discussing and rethinking the social, political and environmental. Amy Spencer is a Bristol-based writer and creative writing tutor.

[Un]expressing pure moments

When I long to write I am least able. The need to condense an experience in words is most illusive the more intense the moment. When the feeling of wonder whirls most westerly, when I am swamped. Over spilling with a gratitude and longing, it is then writing rings reductive. Now, all the goodness of the universe envelopes me and leaves me breathless on a lake district fell. Great Gable to my face, Sca Fell on my back. Tent flapping in the wind, sky still setting stands. Simply stands. Stillness somehow soars. A sense of desire strongly sets in and roughly twists my inner parts. Twists them into the shape of a simple longing. I long for everyone to know love! Against the odds love, unlikely places love, unlovely people love. In an instant I am urgently grateful for the love that permeates my own life. Surrounded by it, I am cradled and rocked within a void. The hills heave a frozen cloak through the sky throwing incandescent frost light ardently. Heated rock that once flowed suddenly seems animated now, not indifferent. Here, I am vaulted by oneness and present in the joyful value of it. In fact for a moment I am connected. It is The Self melted in more.Though I know its the gaps, the scale, the reality of uncertainty that prised me open and created this. I don't seek to appropriate mass meaning out of thin air nor assign a one size fits all answer but instead I want to anchor the personally significant to some kind of bedrock, one I can share. The tension between personal experience and community rushes in with the wind. May I find ways to express the inarticulate. Seek opportunity to unfurl this longing in action. Find the simple faith to enact a beautiful and hope filled expression of life. May I fight for the purity that sometimes swells up within me. A purity living in each of us and waiting in everything, so goes my chosen belief.

For Noah

Noah

Now an early lesson

The point of poetry 

When the gravity of a moment outweighs the power of words

When your desire to communicate outstrips that straight jacket language of the everyday

Then have a play, with words

Like now

I don't know what to write

Yet my first thought is my best thought

When it comes to self expression it is that I wish I had been taught

You are primed for life 

everyday vaulting into new

Learning, pushing your boundaries, expanding in knowledge and skill

May you hold that posture into adulthood, may you drink your fill

Yearning, burning with life 

As you are now

Attune with a oneness you must not forget 

As your identity firms do not own the illusion of separateness 

For we are not our own but connected

You are another me 

Your humanity,
is wrapped up in mine

A person is a person through other people

However other that person is 

We are made from the same stuff, recycled through the spiral of dust
and water

We reanimate, that is something to celebrate.  

People will talk about truth 

Say they know a thing or two 

Though Noah, if they stay aloof

Their message has no mileage 

Actions provide the proof.

Build bridges instead of walls

Not weapons but tools

Learn Love

It might come from above?

It does come from within 

It is there you should begin.

thank you Anna - simplicity

Where I worry
Where glory
isn't
When wonder won't
Joy just stands still
Then
In prayer
Stare, at
Myself
No longer


I outraged a few people when I mentioned that I prayed the other day. Have worried a few friends like that too. Anyway, this time in panicked tones they asked me to clarify. It didn't fit. Yes it's true I don't like certainty, have a mistrust of it. A recalcitrant knee jerk is my impulse to the ambition of certainties dominion. I consider it a narrower of possibility. On the face of humanity certainty is too often grimace, too often violence. I am with Ben Okri on this, if the towers of certainty were ever to fall it would mark the triumph of Time over the 'insane arrogance of human certainties'. So it would seem that people often tend to merge prayer life with a certain life, from the outside a pray'er has certainty, or a suspicious desire for the feeling of it. Well the desire is not suspicious but human, that aside I know that prayer and certainty are not synonymous in my own vocabulary, nor am I trying to recruit or borrow existential guarantee's when I pray. No, for me prayer is something utterly different. It is a place I enter. I understand those who are disturbed by the narrowness of the word prayer and its fixed superstitious associations. Speaking personally I feel content to still use the word. For me it is wide enough still, offering us a way of talking about something we all do or rather a place we all go. The transcendent nature of certain moments, that over-spilling, when reaching lunges of undefined desire draw out an up welling of what feels like my deepest self. For me prayer is not about certainty, I ask for nothing and don't expect to be heard. Prayer is the domain I step into to abide in wonder, to transmit gratefulness, tap strength, cultivate kindness, own joy, know peace, tangle with desperation, explore pain and maybe melt into oneness. Before I step in to this place I don't know which of these will flow. I know some might find it unfair that I have appropriated such universal human experience and draped a religious word like prayer on it. Of course meditation is a word that might serve us. We could use mindfulness even, though if we do then it needs to draw from the great traditions of mindfulness across the religions, else the same pitfalls await us and we loose refined insight too. What ever words are used to explore this posture I have described let them all be shared, my word is prayer yet it is something more and it is everyone's. If they are to transform us (enhance community's) uncertainties sometimes need names.   

Elegant

Today I look at you and soar
Your sea rushes to my shore
Crystal eyes shine blue
You glow and shiver energy
I dream of future synergy
Again my love for you is new