ah Kirstie, I always come to your posts at just the right time. I listened to your reading of the poem and it touched something me that helped me cry today. I really needed that. I have been struggling to surrender to a very big and sore change in my life. But your idea of practising falling as we walk, is helping me to maybe find a different way of letting go.
thank you for writing, and thank you for sticking with Substack and sharing your work in the world. it is helping at least one person, on the southern most tip of a continent, to heal
Dear Toni, thank you in return for your work and the healing and illumination that comes with it. Sometimes we need to cry, and I too am grateful to those writers, who with restraint, and care bring forward my own tears. Practising falling into water, or into a nice big pile of cushions is my only recommendation with this. When I fall into water, I scrunch myself up into a small ball, and cover my head (in case my surfboard hits me); and there is some relief too in this small protective casing. And, I’m always afraid before I fall, this doesn’t change, so in part this practice reaches further into unfamiliar ideas around trust and the unknown. And too, a bit of play with all the seriousness (I’m very serious). These are the things I’ve been thinking about. Can I also acknowledge the soreness you mention here Toni, and I thank you for sharing this world alongside me, and many others.
Love the tenderness in this poem. Something here about our inner resources, that we or at least, I, often pay too little attention to, tending more to look outwards. But conversations like this, one aspect of the self in dialogue with another, can be, as this shows, so powerful, steadying, enriching. We do have reserves of wisdom that creative work, and playfulness can reveal.
And I love the painting. That the surfer is a mere suggestion of a being, almost not there, a dream figure, but the strength in her paddling, her determination, are clear. By contrast, the butterfly is concrete reality, the strong dark outline of the wing, the black dot. Offering the surfer some sort of certainty. Invitation. Fall in this direction. These butterflies Kirstie!! How they glide in and out of your days. What a gift!
Thank you Carolyn for this wonderful reflection on this piece. To me the stuttering flight of the butterfly across the water speaks somehow to me after making this art: the sureness of its wings in the painting/the remembered reality of tripping flight.
ah Kirstie, I always come to your posts at just the right time. I listened to your reading of the poem and it touched something me that helped me cry today. I really needed that. I have been struggling to surrender to a very big and sore change in my life. But your idea of practising falling as we walk, is helping me to maybe find a different way of letting go.
thank you for writing, and thank you for sticking with Substack and sharing your work in the world. it is helping at least one person, on the southern most tip of a continent, to heal
Dear Toni, thank you in return for your work and the healing and illumination that comes with it. Sometimes we need to cry, and I too am grateful to those writers, who with restraint, and care bring forward my own tears. Practising falling into water, or into a nice big pile of cushions is my only recommendation with this. When I fall into water, I scrunch myself up into a small ball, and cover my head (in case my surfboard hits me); and there is some relief too in this small protective casing. And, I’m always afraid before I fall, this doesn’t change, so in part this practice reaches further into unfamiliar ideas around trust and the unknown. And too, a bit of play with all the seriousness (I’m very serious). These are the things I’ve been thinking about. Can I also acknowledge the soreness you mention here Toni, and I thank you for sharing this world alongside me, and many others.
Love the tenderness in this poem. Something here about our inner resources, that we or at least, I, often pay too little attention to, tending more to look outwards. But conversations like this, one aspect of the self in dialogue with another, can be, as this shows, so powerful, steadying, enriching. We do have reserves of wisdom that creative work, and playfulness can reveal.
And I love the painting. That the surfer is a mere suggestion of a being, almost not there, a dream figure, but the strength in her paddling, her determination, are clear. By contrast, the butterfly is concrete reality, the strong dark outline of the wing, the black dot. Offering the surfer some sort of certainty. Invitation. Fall in this direction. These butterflies Kirstie!! How they glide in and out of your days. What a gift!
Thank you Carolyn for this wonderful reflection on this piece. To me the stuttering flight of the butterfly across the water speaks somehow to me after making this art: the sureness of its wings in the painting/the remembered reality of tripping flight.
Wow Kirstie what a beautiful, simple and powerful poem 🥰