BUBBLE CHAMBER WEARY

I wish I could string together my moments of ‘brilliance’. They’re like scintillations in a bubble chamber - blink and they’re gone, leaving you questioning whether they were there at all.

Like particle physicists seeking undiscovered subatomic particles, I wish those ideas could last half an hour. I could photograph them! Show the world! Build them into a solid theory!

Alas, I can barely remember my moments of so-called brilliance, let alone put them into coherence. I sat down at the piano today and played about five minutes of something. Then it was gone. I was back to my usual old bluffery, the chords and inversions I always play and the patterns my friends could detect blindfolded - vintage me.

That’s the thing though isn’t it? They say you should craft your voice, find your own unique sound or writing style or brushstroke technique or whatever. But doing that with variety, with genuine creative expansion, that’s the tricky part. I figure I need help.

Anyway, at the moment it’s all bubble and no brilliance. Perhaps it’s just a matter of time. Or perhaps it’s just the art of letting go of thinking I need to be brilliant. But I don’t want to be bored; I do want to excite myself with something new every now and then.

I’ll be back to it, the weary scientist at the piano.

IMPOSSIBLE SUNLIGHT

That was Easter then! Strange. Didn't really feel like it. Sigh. I know. What was it supposed to feel like? 1986, when we all got Easter eggs in KitKat mugs? Early 2000s, chasing nephews around the garden for a logistically pre-planned, completely fair-and-square egg-hunt? Or perhaps, the original Easter, when scared men and women blinked into the impossible sunlight and couldn't quite believe it?

To be fair, it's been unusual for us. We've not been as involved with everything as we'd like to have been, and that's made it feel a bit more disconnected. We did however, get time to spend with family, even if we could only make a fleeting appearance at our church Easter Festival. On Good Friday, we had hot cross buns with my parents, and listened to tales of their latest travels. Considering my Dad had a stroke a year ago, you might as well go ahead and count that as a bit of an Easter miracle.

I've said it before, but I really think I like the Saturday. I feel like it should have a better name than Holy Saturday, as it just seems so quiet and mysterious, so deeply profound - and, isn't every Saturday kind of 'holy'? But in these things you have to defer to the people who've been naming things the longest, and on this occasion, it happens to be the Catholics, so Holy Saturday I guess it is, and far be it from me to start calling it Mystery Saturday or Tenebrae-Shabbat or something. I mean Betwixtmas didn't really catch on.

Easter Sunday was relaxed. Don't get me wrong, I like that too! It's like a trumpet fanfare of freedom, a glorious dawn after a long night - there's much to celebrate. I wasn't playing at church, which meant that we could enjoy a classic roast with Sammy's family. That of course means food, and not each of us taking the mickey out of each other. Although, in a small way, it actually meant that too, but of course that kind of thing's far better done naturally. And, over an actual roast.

I suppose I miss the exact combination of things that were required to make it like the Easters I remember. Some things were close - the family texting 'He is Risen!' and then me repeatedly texting back 'He is Risen Indeed!' (which, if you're a follower of Jesus, is the done thing) plus lovely chocolate eggs and snacks and cards and songs. It's okay to miss the precision of the combination - seasons change, and Sammy and I are still working out what our own family traditions are, and will be, for things like this. In some ways, that new, fresh, unexpected world of working out what's next, is actually the spirit of Easter. After all, those disciples who celebrated it first must have been quickly working out that everything - everything, had to be different. There was no way it couldn't be. And, as a follower of Jesus, I don't think I'd have it any other way. 

MALAISE

I’ve been in a malaise. I said that to Sammy and she said it sounded like a French sauce, which, to be fair, it does - rather than what I actually meant: a sickly quietude, an aimless sort of depression. That to me is a ‘malaise’ - a shoulder shrug of qu’est-que-c’est seeping in like stagnant water. She wasn’t trying to be flippant. We talked about it.

Brené Brown, the noted American social science expert, says it’s what happens when creativity has no outlet. It blocks up the pores, bubbles inside, creates tension, perhaps even leaking out in tears every now and again. It’s an interesting theory: I haven’t been particularly creative recently, and there has been a lot in my mind. I’ve also been dreaming about the past, which, I have to tell you, is probably the very worst kind of time travel. Tears flow easily from the past - it does not help with the malaise.

So this morning, I got up and went for a walk.

No coat. That was just on the edge of sensible, I realised, as the chilly morning wind whipped around me. It was sunny though. Clear sunlight fell on fresh trees, leaves, and soil, and it picked out the white blossom swaying gently against the sky.

I sat on a log. Birds wheeled, planes glinted over the green hills of Hampshire. Through the trees the silver motorway span its ribbon, and the low sun painted the golden tops of houses, distant factories and buildings, as the world slowly got moving for the day.

There is… there is more going on than I can write about. It confuses things for me, makes problems harder to solve, people harder to talk to. I have my moments - but they’re so fleeting aren’t they? A half an hour? It’s barely enough time to discuss the weather! An hour? Luxury to some, not enough for deep enough, it turns out. I need a week. And who’s got a week to talk to me? Come to think of it, who’s got a week to spend talking? I don’t. And neither does my wife. Her brain leaps like a gazelle sometimes; it’s difficult to keep up.

So perhaps then, my creativity plus my circumstances have made this malaise unavoidable? Or perhaps I’m focusing on the wrong thing, and I should be working on ways to live with it rather than lament against it.

Moments like this morning make me wonder that. I need to get back to poetry, to song writing, to art, somehow. But how? Perhaps even to just being by myself in the woods, under the blue sky, listening to the uncluttered melody of the robin and the song thrush.

REST IN SACRED SPACES

We’re at the spa today.

It always makes me reevaluate the idea of something being ‘sacred’, or, a ‘sacred space’ - brimming as the place is with Romano-Greek-infused notions of rest.

The Graces are upstairs, locked in a sisterly embrace. There are sculptures of Hera and Hestia, offering fruit, and the walls are replete with painted nymphs carrying amphorae. For the Romans of course, the boundary line between sacred and restful was much more subtle: the spa and the temple were one.

Sacred really means just ‘set apart’ I believe. Some things are to be treated with such delicacy, such honour, that they’re deliberately kept away from everyday life - undiluted like the finest of wine or the purest waters. That’s perhaps the heart of what we’ve learned to call holiness - that calling to be apart from the everyday.

I find myself wondering whether we’ve all lost a little bit of that distinction. After all, we carry our phones everywhere - even to our ‘sacred spaces’ these days. These things (and, full disclosure, I’m using one right now) do have a terrible habit of opening portals to the underworld, despite also being rather useful. It’s a quandary for certain.

Anyway. We’ve rested and eaten, read, slept, and chatted. We’ve laid back under the artificial stars and gazed at the very real clouds in the outside area. We’ve closed our eyes too and let the slumbering ambience of the tepidarium engulf us - well I did. I snorted myself awake in there, embarrassingly. 

It’s all a good feeling - the art, perhaps the sacred art of rest. It’s not perhaps ‘worship’ as the Romans would have seen it, and it’s not traditional holiness in the way that the word ‘sacred’ implies it might be to our churchified way of thinking. But there are elements. Even God built rest into creation; a kind of hardwired necessity for all living, breathing, spiritual things.

You know what? That’s alright with me.