FULL BUCK MOON: writing from the body
GRIND//GROUND INKLINGS hybrid, because it's all coming from the same spirit infused bag of bones
Greetings on this FULL BUCK MOON.
It has been a while since I wrote a FULL MOON post and I thank you for your patience and readership through the winter of this (dis)content (1). This piece of writing writes about the act of writing and in the writing of it revealed a lot to me. Writing, as I have said a lot here (I think), is a process of revealing. The more I write from a place of curiosity and revealment the more I am connected to my life, and I also speak to the times when words don’t. quite. come.
The FULL BUCK MOON in July is called such as this is the time of year when buck deer shed last year’s antlers and new ones begin to grow. The autumn and winter time are often known as times of shedding and composting that which needs to be let go of in the inner and outer landscapes, but this high summer (2) shedding also feels relevant and relatable.
The last few months have felt like a slow melting of a lot of internalised contortions and contractions. There has been an en masse questioning of beliefs and subsequent behaviours related to how I work, live, communicate and how I view the parts of me that rise and fall, sometimes at breakneck speed. I am noticing and note-making and it isn’t clear the way forward, but the ground of the body, of the process, of the trust of the unknown returns again and again.
To be honest with you I have felt utterly lost at points and baffled as to how to proceed. And yet, and yet, and yet when I can remember, after hours and days of not, I know that this is all part of the way.
We are so indoctrinated to believe that linear and smooth and steady are how things should be, but the life and death cycle is within us and outside of us all the darn time (3).
I will return to this at the end of this FULL MOON//GRIND GROUND//INKLINGS mash-up hybrid post, after some writing on the body which I wrote some weeks ago before the stuttering took hold.
I sometimes resist the work of writing, I resist my own psychic suffering more, and writing has become for me a primary means of digesting and integrating my experiences and thereby reducing the pains of living, or if not at least making them useful to myself and others. This is no pain in my life that has not been given value by the alchemy of creative attention.
Melissa Febos - Body Work
Writing From The Body
Writing by hand with ink on the page always brings forward truth. The kind of truth that invites more air into the lungs, a flare of heat in the chest, a grit in the teeth. That provokes the arrival of tears, excitement and other feeling flavours that have been shifting around below the surface.
A truth that is personal to this body, this moment, this mind, this being.
Writing directly into the digital realms I find more clipped. The tap-tap-tap a staccato thrum easy to cease for a moment of deliberation that brings more neatly formed words. Not a bad thing, just different. The physical act is different, it flows in another form.
There are so many ways to write. There are so many reasons to write. There are so many things to write to. To ourselves, to the world, to other people…. and then we are working with our idea of who these other people are and what they want from us, and what they don’t want from us.
We may imagine that what we have to say isn’t super interesting. We may worry that we’ll be seen too clearly if we share too much, or not clearly enough if we don’t say everything. We may fear boring our readers. We may fear upsetting someone, or everyone, or ourselves. We may not want to know how we really are, what we really think or feel.
Ok… by we I mean I and I reckon i’m not alone here.
The fears or being received can often feel paradoxical, and can relate to our fears of showing up in the world. The too bigness, the not enoughness. Too small ness and the blazing, world-roasting behemoth of our blood and bones.
I find this to be true. That I experience a push-pull between wanting to be gargantuan and bring the main character energy, and the longing to scurry away and never be seen again. Perhaps this is the sway of the life-boat upon the sea of living, that we hope finds more of an even keel as years pass. Or our boats become stronger, more able to weather the storms, more barnacles cemented to the bottom, as we grow and change. We get to be better sailors.
Writing is a grounding. The same way ink making is a grounding. The same way walking is a grounding.
There is this thing that happens in my body when I have written well. Well for me. Well for this body. Well expressed. Truthful. A point made, or threads gathered. Something expressed. It may not be a literary wellness. Not initially. Not ever. It may not wow the crowds of Hay Festival. It may not have queues out the door waiting for a signed copy.
But it is a piece that makes my body shudder with its own settling breath, like the release after a good cry, or the glow after a soft climax with a loved human -self or other. There is a visceral, corporeal experience of writing the good stuff that I am learning to relish and trust.
To place writing in the shiny box of the academic, the purely cerebral, the learned, the rationale with only immovable fact, is ungenerous, and yet we may carry with us this belief that writing is not for us. We may not find aspects of it easy and loathe the look and feel of our words, or feel ashamed by our misspellings. It may take us back to a school that didn’t support our uniqueness, or remind us of our own feelings of unbelonging in a myriad of ways.
It is no wonder we may have ingested this high-brow literary bothering and its ivory-towered gatekeeping that only serves to embolden the already emboldened.
Those with a voice, with the right voice, are the ones who get to speak and be heard, to hold power and to influence and make an impact.
This right voice may appear as good grammar, excellent spelling, ‘the queen’s English’. I speak as a first-language English speaker, and I am curious if this form stands in other languages, or if it is the make-up of the language of colonisers and the purveyors of ‘civilisation’.
We may have a story in us we have not heard others speak.
Where there are hindrances to expression and articulation, to being seen and given space, there is power and this naturally brings with it oppression. Narratives are the bedrock of cultures and systems. To live within the narratives created by systems and cultures in positions of power can mean sharing the power if we fit the bill of ‘belonging’ or being oppressed if we do not. In colonial, eurocentric, capitalistic and topically patriarchal systems rooted in binary thinking, there is always a good and bad, a right and a wrong.
Writing, living, thinking, and feeling beyond the binary, within the multitudinous flex of this complex and fluid life right here is a radical act. When we challenge the wrongness and rightness we have been subjected to and internalised we are in the orbit of personal and collective liberation.
I’m here for an embodied revolution of the act of writing as a practice of connection to the body, and as an act of personal truth-speaking. From this body and moment right here, with its confluence of conditions and experiences.
I have written in notebooks and scraps of paper as an act of survival since childhood. When I could not verbally articulate the things I would find a way to write. When I found the people around me too loud, scary, and confusing I would write. To sense make and work out what I felt (I remember having a little smiley face key in my pre-emoji childhood diary to track how I was feeling when I wrote) and what I thought.
I never once thought I may then go on to have this as a way to work and connect with others in adulthood. I was too busy just piecing together how to survive and running on instinct. The same instinct that drew me out into the fields and to the beaches.
The thing with this type of writing - for the act of it, for seeing where it leads, for the soothing, enlightening connection it brings, i that this truth isn’t always easy, but it is better than the alternative of numbness or being swept away by the world and lost to yourself.
As Penelope states in Bridgerton, and I paraphrase, she writes because it is where she can express her thoughts and feelings in a world that doesn’t allow space for her to do this elsewhere. There is sweet pleasure in writing this to you. There is a togetherness in writing a rallying cry of camaraderie to you, dearest gentle reader.
My handwritten notebooks are full of questioning and rawness at the moment. Questions of mid-life and what home feels like, and how it isn’t always in the place where my bills arrive. It is becoming clear how defined by fear this body has been, and how safety-making through avoidance, a whirlwind of doing and worrying, and the shutdown of overwhelm has shaped my world.
I call for rawness and realness to be offerings from those who feel compelled to share, with their own hands on their heart and feet on the earth as support. This isn’t about having a nervy b (said lightly, but with all the honouring of this being a real thing) on the page day after day and spilling that out into the world in a way that fractures and causes more pain.
Nobody needs re-traumatising, especially not on the internet. But also there is healing to be had in giving the ache to express in us the space to do so. Whispered into our own secreted pages, written in the sand on the beach to be washed away by the tide, muttered into voicenotes to friends, or written in paint and scrawled across walls.
I’m huffing on about it so much because it is what the body wants. What the body loves. The tender loving of pen and paper. The true eroticism of wholeness, as audre lorde taught us. Pleasure and expression found in bodies so tight with the restraints of simply being themselves for themselves.
Writing brings this into more knowing within my own body.
Our bodies are our bodies. Our expressions are our expressions.
May we find our own ways to write.
I don’t mean to argue that writing personally is for everyone. What i’m saying is: don’t avoid yourself. The story that comes calling might be your own and it might not go away if you don’t open the door. I don’t believe in writers block. I only belive in fear. And you can be afraid and still write something. No one has to read it, though when you’re done you might want them to. One of the epigraphs of my second book - though it could be an epigraph for my life - is a quote from the British psycholanaliyst D. W. Winnicott: “ It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found.”
Melissa Febos. Body Work
Since I began compiling this piece of writing I have found the words drying up. I can’t quite describe why this is.
I have been sorting through 10+ years of artwork and practice these last few weeks. Looking back to move forward. My memory can get hazy, which I am now coming to recognise as the particular way of neurospicey minds. Revisiting the threads of thought and curiosity and attention that have spanned a decade or more is gratifying and hitting deep in the feels. It’s saying “See, you have achieved so much, even when you’ve been spinning. Your multiple interests aren’t so disparate.”
This experience. This doing. This being with what is right here and processing takes time. It doesn’t want to be rushed and verbalised and ‘understood’ in the being-able-to-talk-about-it-all-rationally-and-clearly kind of a way.
Other knowings are present.
Other wisdoms and experience and timeframes and energies are pulling at me.
Trying to verbalise where I am at right now is frustrating as fuck.
In a coaching call with the splendid ADHD artist coach, producer and all-round lovely human Tom Bevan (hi Tom!) I managed to verbalise that I was “learning to trust the mode I’m in”. Tom reminded me that the deeper, somatic, mental and emotional awareness development IS the research. As a neurospicey human this is the material I am working with. This often looks like needing to escape to the woods to reconnect to my own body and breathe when feeling overwhelmed and my mind is going 90 miles an hour in every direction.
If I don’t make this part of my practice, if I don’t allow myself to take a breath and regroup and I try and push on through, I end up in the most addled and unwell of places. I am trying to push through because I “should be working”. But that “work” is infused with panic and fear and pain and exhaustion.
If we are not aware of what is driving our work, our doing, it will largely be an unmet need, a craving for something or an avoidance of something else, we will be constantly in combat.
This is SO part of the practice.
But it isn’t one i can plop on the wall of a gallery right now.
There is a hungry, craving part of my mind that wants to make things safe and certain. It wants for THIS to be THE THING/THE WAY/THE ANSWER. Ultimately to avoiding suffering. The very nature of being human.
This period of research and development is grinding in deep to the very ground of the identities I hold, to this place of ‘home’ I have returned to and all it holds.
It is not neat and tidy. It is not neat and tidy. But I want to share a little of it here.
I find connection and affirmation in artist mentor friends, in those around me who are doing the work of growing in self-awareness, wisdom and kindness, and those who make me laugh and lighten the day when respite and a pause from the soul searching is needed.
There is also respite in the rocks, after a most excellent day last week on the coast with colleague and comrade Dr Morgan Jones. This I will share more of later.
(1) This natural slip of a literary reference pun surprised me. I have had to google where this quote is from - “This is the winter of our discontent” - and it’s Shakespeare’s Richard III for those who also didn’t know. How bloody high brow. Now back to more deliciously low brow/ median brow/ brow-multitudinous writings.
(2) High summer here is drizzle and chilly winds, and i’m here for it.
(3) This part of my practice is being greatly guided and supported by the work and words of Melissa Febos, adrienne maree brown and Toko Pa Turner, among many others. We are all part of the web, remembering thing to each other. Ever grateful for those who share their remembering.
In warm camaraderie,
KJ
✺ gentle writing attention ✺
GRIEF STUDIES with Fariha Roisin
LANDSCAPES Writing Group with Cody Cook-Parrott
NARRATIVE NON-FICTION WORKSHOP with Ruth Allen
Gosh, Kath, these words spoke directly to a little piece of my soul that has been crying out for affirmation. In the naming and the describing of how we write; the struggles and the joys; when the inspiration rises and when it stutters to a halt, I feel, as they say, so incredibly 'seen'. I'm so glad to be able to read your words and feel huge appreciation for how generously you keep bringing yourself to the page/to the screen. Thanks for sharing this with us all. I'm certain I'll be coming back to this again as I navigate the foibles/frustrations in my own practice xx