Begin at the beginning

A new year. What’s ahead? What is along this new road we are calling 2022?

Perhaps a "I-hope-so” new book. I have had several books published over the years, usually plays or chapters detailing my creative process (see The Belonging Trilogy ) and two theses, one called Mouthful of Pins (Research Masters) and House of Homes (my PhD).

I loved writing all of these books, but what I desire now is to write a book of musings, not plays. I want to move away from the performative and step into the world of living. So I’ve decided that if I gather all my writings from the last decade or so, dream on the themes that are important to me still, it may just be the book I want to read and therefore are driven to compile: a book deeply steeped in collaboration, spiritual practice, family stories, curiosity of the world and all its beauty/ ugliness, and personal opinions that are relevant to today.

So this is my first contribution to that book of life, and it doesn't matter if I keep it (I doubt I will) or use it as a “warming to the task” exercise.

Tentatively I will call this piece of writing “I change myself”…and the reason is it’s the first line of this random piece of writing I uncovered as I was dusting one of my dozen bookshelves: “You have to par down” I’m told “throw out the whodunnits” … and yes, perhaps I need to move them on, but right now my attention is focused on my task today: to write up a random piece of writing and understand why I wrote it in the first place.

I CHANGE MYSELF

“When I change mediums”,( I wrote, probably over 20 years ago), “I change myself”. Of course I wrote this. It was at the time of studying Creative Arts Therapy, where I experienced the impact and power of depicting a problem, rather than just talking about it. The richness that can be mined from a quick depiction, be it pastel, collage, drawing, scribbling, writing, moving, sculpting or a combination of these mediums. Questions arise, and through depiction problems seem to less potent, or at least not so overwhelming. This writing occurred after I had spent some time playing with pastel. A messy medium, but oh so much fun. I reflected on the drawing, then moved the process into writing. using the pastel depiction becoming my data. I have commented on the steps below.

I begin:

I float in a bubble of colourless.

My small eyes change as the depicted landscape becomes amplified (I have zoomed in on a particular part of the depiction, what we call ‘amplification’ using an aperture created by cutting out a small square in the centre of a piece of paper).

Or am I falling in on myself?

The big picture. Focus on the big picture. (I zoom back out removing the square)

But where is my big picture of verdant green? (I’m looking for something that’s not there)

I see only grey.

I’m going blind like the planet.

A world of pastel grey patchwork.

A world of endless repetition.

Going nowhere.

So how do I move forward?

Through the writing I became the depiction. I internalised the landscape. Grey. I leave this exploration with the question “How do I move forward?”. It’s now time to do another depiction, in response to this question. If I were to do a depiction right now I would start with collage. And work up the grey and see if in the selected images, something reveals itself…something that could give me hope. A reason to continue. Something I “don’t know I know”.

Creative Arts Therapy is not a fast process, it consists of depiction, description, finding the key words, amplifying, reducing, reflecting, writing. and then doing it all over again as we keep refining this hard to pin down “what we don’t know we know”.

It is a rich process, and even richer if we can converse with someone else. This is why group work can be so valuable.

In fact, group work is my passion.

But I’m beyond myself. My first task is to tear up the old piece of paper with this writing scrawled across it. The sheet is yellowing at the edges, and torn in two places. Feels good to rip it up, having realised that it had served its purpose. It was a warm to the task kind of exercise, to begin the journey.

The 2022 journey.