The INKLINGS of beginnings
Making space + reflections on attention.
Hello folks,
My name is Kathryn John and I run The Natural Ink. Project. in Somerset, UK. This shiny Substack space is the new home of INKLINGS: A newsletter and space to explore.
After a number of years of grappling with the ‘gram and other social media platforms as spaces to document and share work, I have decided to untangle myself from the scroll and recalibrate. To begin to unravel the centring of social media as the doorway to connection in my work and practice.
It has been affecting my mental and physical health for a long time, pre-pandemic (remember then?!) and more so as the stuffing has felt more squeezed out of things in recent years. The instant gratification longing has made way to a frustration and nausea brought about by scattered attention.
I’m not wholly anti-social media. There is a lot of good networking and connection that comes through them. However, they are built to keep you on them and I have been finding that my creative practice, physical anxiety, and mental health have been paying the price. The underlying longing and need for connection and conversation within my work is touched, or rather tickled, with this app, but the other guff around the edges has become unbearable. I long for space, for ease and for quality connection. Listening to longings and needs, as the most vital thread of creative practice, is where I find myself, and this spacious substack space is where I have landed.
Black Oak Gall + Iron ink with Found Red Brick Pigment paint.
Writer Johann Hari pointed out in a recent podcast with Dr Ranjan Chatterjee named “How to Reclaim Your Attention” (and I paraphrase his words here) “There is no function on Facebook that says ‘ Your mate Jim is just down the road and up for a pint. Want to go meet Jim?’ - this would take you off the app and out into the world, to the pub, with Jim. This isn’t what the apps are built for. They earn money when you are on them. It doesn’t benefit them to promote connection off the app.” This I have been reflecting on a great deal since I listened. I have come to notice how getting OFF a habit, a patter, a social media thirst is only part of the shift towards more connection, better health, and more creativity. It is also about making containers, spaces, and action to tend these things in the outside world.
Ok, so I did not wish to welcome you all here with big chat about the shennanigans of the Meta-Universe, but i’m sure it will be popping back into this INKLINGS space in the coming weeks and months as it is such a rich and sticky thing affecting our collective lives right now.
Tending and sustaining creative practice (and by this I mean anything from regular writing, learning a new art process, being an artist/crafter/maker, remembering to be patient and present with your partner/children/co-workers, making a home, making a life, living in close connection to your heart and values….) is rooted in attention.
Attention is the most valuable commodity of our time.
What we give our attention to is what forms our days and what builds our lives.
Maintaining our attention and even knowing what it is we want to focus on is a daily practice.
Calendula grown + gathered 2021 at Tinkers Bubble, Somerset.
With things coming in from the outside world: rolling news, updated Gram stories, emails from work, demands from our nearest and dearest, life life-ing all over the shop, and all of the intensity of an inner landscape that is often running riot: the weariness, the uncertainties, the anxieties, the need to move, the not knowing what we need, the auto-pilot mode, the physical niggles….. Well, shit be bananas.
What I would like to offer here are insights and support in listening to and following our INKLINGS. Those longings and calls we have for living a life that feels rich, true, creative and meaningful. Making space for what we love and that which brings us alive AND we leaning into connection and support when we feel overwhelmed, uncomfortable, in pain and unsure. INKLINGS is about it all. The ebb and flow. The light and dark. The peaks and troughs. And the middling ground. The space of nuance and both. The seeming paradoxes we all hold in our world. The noticing how our minds and hearts need connection AND solitude, freedom AND stability seemingly all in the same moment, and how when this happens all we can do is reach for the Dairy Milk and Downton re-runs to soothe. With no judgment for the DM + D days. With no judgment for any of it. Or rather noticing the judgments that come and welcoming them in to join you on the sofa too. Judging our judgments can tie us up in all kinds of knots.
So, a little bit about me. Defining and labelling I can often avoid with a waft of a dismissive hand, but I have recently been told that in my writing work I often leave out possessive pronouns - I - and I am learning to claim more space as I, so here I go.
My name is Kathryn and my pronouns are they-them and she-her. I am non-binary being in their late-30s. A Highly Sensitive Person, mostly introverted with a love of performing and people. I am first and foremost a writer. I have been keeping diaries since I was 11 and these were spaces for me to explore how I felt and what I thought about things. I still write. I still work things out on the page. I am still learning to listen to and trust my own voice. I wholeheartedly believe in the power of writing and creating as a way to better understand self, world, and other. I also wholeheartedly believe that this is ESSENTIAL in a world dominated by reactivity, fear and misused power.
I began making NATURAL INK. from found and gathered plants, earth and metals a few years ago at a time when I was figuring out some big health stuff. It became a process that tapped into the curious 8 year old me who loved to make dens and cook up mud stews, nestled between the Laylandia in the front garden. I grew up in wellies on the mean-countryside byways of south-west wales and this landscape and nature-spirit connection I felt at this time (but naturally didn’t have a name for) has stayed with me.
Studio ink time in north Pembrokeshire, 2020. Credit: Anna Lukala
My creative practice is the daily returning to something true, real and right here, and expressing from there. In my work, my relationships and to myself. To the many-layered, competing elements of self that make up this human being. To recognising I am not this one train of thought, or this one feeling, but all of these elements and parts. The most important word in all of this is practice. It’s a practice of the bit with “the work” and “the work around the work”. It’s all the bloody work if you ask me. The not so CV friendly, un-grammable tending of a life lived alongside the things, objects and work that gets created and put into the world as a tangible thing.
I write, I make ink from the natural world, I draw, I garden and grow food and flowers, I make food, I make spaces, I meditate (I have recently returned to the cushion after some time away), I run, I walk, I dance, I sing, I weep, I hug, I speak, I laugh, I set up Substack spaces to dare to share, dare to try, dare to fall and connect.
I have been telling myself for a long time “when I get THERE I will REALLY begin to do the work. When I achieve THIS I will start to show-up in the world as the fully messy, uncertain, creative human I am.”
That day isn’t going to come.
I kept shifting the goalposts of what THERE and THIS look like, and all the while living as a tight bud, to misquote Anais Nin, has been getting strained and painful. The act of taking up space and sharing work, like with all things, ebbs and flows with the seasons and this Spring there is another bursting forth of life. By no means I have wall-flowered the last few years as NATURAL INK. has been growing, but I do still feel like there is a holding back that is heavy on the brow and uncomfortable like a stone in the shoe. I don’t know if you ever get to the “ah, that’s better” moment where all of the creative juice is flowing. I noticed a while ago that however good the previous day or week had been for me making work and being on the creative juice train, I still had to find ways to show up today, tomorrow and keep on going. Sustainable creative practice. That always shifts. That’s always changing. Where else would I want to be?!
I thought that if I set up a lovely NATURAL INK. project full of beautiful colour from nature, and that was that I could ride high on that. I would be OUT in the world, and it would all be so super pleasing no one could have any problem with it and I would just-be-awesomely-successful-being-all beautifully-lovely-doing-this-lovely-work.
And this longing kept nagging.
It kept saying “ but this lovely colour making is the VEHICLE for your heart. It is a part. But it isn’t the whole.“
Copper, Iron + Oak
There are currently four hats I wear and I need to wear them all at regular intervals: writer, ink maker, teacher/facilitator and performer. They are all their vying for space. Flattening any mental gremlin that says “but you must just be ONE thing”. I wonder if you find this too. The mind troll that taunts you with a need to label, define and refine your longings. But heaven forbid you do. The backlash of “you call yourself a WRITER!! Pffft…” I feel you, my friend. We’ll talk more about trolls and gremlins as time goes on.
So, my wordy self even snuck my wordy longings into the name NATURAL INK.
I changed it to NATURAL INK. from FERAL INK. in 2020 when I realised that so much of what I was seeing in the outside world and experiencing in my inner world, was about pushing away and othering. A making FERAL of that which is so naturally human. This sits at the very heart of western culture. Of imperialist, capitalist patriarchy. The oppression of people, identities, and qualities that do not sit in the central power structure of white, straight, male and rich/powerful. I do not want to play that game anymore. Of seeing the wild as out there and fierce, beyond the boundaries. To unravel the Cartesian nature/culture, me/other notion that sits at the root of western culture and the English language and to fling my arms wide and welcome it all in as so utterly NATURAL.
There is also another narrative deliciously entwined in the use of words such as FERAL and WILD which I have all of the time for. It is rooted in myth and archetypal narratives where a person must encounter these out there lands, within and without themselves, to better claim their wholeness. This was where my original FERAL was found. That is a whole world of deep heart-diving wonder that sits true. And I sit with NATURAL INK. stoking the fire of the hearth of homecoming, waiting in trust that we will always return.
The INK. is all about incorporating, including and integrating. The daily personal journey of welcoming all that arises and arrives on the inner landscape of the heart and mind and finding ways to roll and ride with it. More hearth. More homecoing. More giving space and welcoming back. It is also the active part where pen meets paper, brush meets canvas, words meet air after the surrendering to the NATURAL edges where we gather our lost colours.
This is where I am rooted in this unfolding creative life.
I write to share and invite these conversations with you. With other folks who long to live their hearty, earthy, arty lives in as much fullness as they can bear.
I knew that this first post would be a big one. I am setting out the stall, to some degree, as the flavours and focuses of the day and of the words will shift and evolve and change their weather as time goes on. But this first expulsion feels somewhat like taking an enema. Less fecal matter thought and more heart splurge.
I stand for connection.
I stand for care.
I stand for wholeheartedly believing in our messy, human selves, even when we need reminding.
I stand for creativity.
I stand for camaraderie.
I stand for making space and taking up space.
I stand for seeing what happens and seeing where we end up.
Welcome to INKLINGS
Copper Blue + Oak Gall inks.
Colour making days and weekends coming up:
*SPRING INK Day Workshop in Bristol on Saturday 9th April at The Engine Rooms. *SEASONAL COLOUR Weekends at Dove Studios, Somerset:
May 21-22, July 2-3, October 15-16
Small batch, handmade Natural Ink. bottles available in webshop.