About flowjournals
This is my second post of the day, at nearly 6pm, twelve hours on from the first, though I won’t publish it until Friday 23rd. I’ve completed a day of teaching in between, and I wanted to elaborate. My intention is to publish these blogs twice per week, on Wednesdays and Fridays. I’m starting this blog after hesitating and procrastinating for nearly two years, and I deliberately wanted to post something fragmentary and incomplete. To let go enough to do that.
I think it’s Gary Vaynerchuk who talks about documentation rather than creation when it comes to this kind of writing, and to tell the truth, I have rather a hard time with this concept. I want every scrap of work I publish to be art, poetry, to function at some kind of high level. Can I let go enough to embrace the messiness of blogging, the documenting? Will it interfere with the way my poems get written, will it leave me with less to say?
So says the mind, or part of it, wagging a finger.
Only one way to find out. Some risk in a risk-averse life. And this blog is really not so much about poetry as meditation and mind-states. Heart-states too. The flow of the body in movement, quite possibly. But a sharing of interests that aren’t poetry, but which are also important to me.
So I thought I would start by thinking about documenting a phrase of Gandhi’s I heard recently: the ‘blessed monotony’ of spiritual practice. It’s a phrase I instantly loved, because it speaks to me about why I love not only meditation but other repetitive endeavours, such as taking much the same walk each day, or playing the same Jack Gilbert and Elizabeth Bishop recordings before I sit down to redraft poems. It’s that sense of arrival you get in doing the familiar thing, a feeling of being welcomed by the practice, the habit, the ritual, perhaps embraced. In all the change, the uncertainty, something which remains, if not the same, at least recognisable, as a loved face is. The stop, the pause, the slowing to listen.