My initial enquiry, the focus of my blog posts up to early 2020, was about going deeply into desire. The intention was to explore what it was I wanted on a deep level. That enquiry actually began in 2016, but I started the blog two years later. During 2019 I reached a place of sensing what it was I really was wanting – to open more to connection in a full sense. I had just started pulling the enquiry together into a book form when some big things occurred – for me and for others. First, the movement teacher, Suprapto Suryodarmo, who has been a strong influence and inspiration for me for many years, died. This was followed by the Covid19 pandemic and then by the death of my meditation teacher, Rob Burbea. During the second “lockdown” of the pandemic, I contracted the Covid19 virus and became very ill. This experience changed me in many ways. I completely let go of my profession as a dramatherapist. And I found myself in the weird world of Long Covid – a condition of severe exhaustion which lasted almost a year.
My instinct for enquiry had remained, but my sense of direction and focus felt very uncertain. Uncertainty seems to be a personal and global quality of being at the present. I understand, of course, that this has actually always been so – but the experience and awareness of uncertainty has been hugely heightened for people. My desires to open and to go deeper have remained – but what can I offer now? Then, after reviewing the poetry I had written during 2021 and into 2022, I began to see a theme emerging – something about “being between” one thing and another, or exploring what is happening when “being at the edge”. These senses of being reflected my own experiences: my health, my social position as a retired person, my wanderings in the natural world, etc. So I deepened my focus on the theme of “At the Edge”.
This culminated in a reading and performance of some of my poems exploring this theme. These moved from the edge of the woods, to the edge of the sea, to the edge of life, to the edge of extinction – an edge I feel keenly as the earth teeters on the edge of climate and ecological disaster.
So – what next? It can only be over/past/beyond the edge – into the unknown. I feel the inner requirement to somehow find a way of being Home in the Unknown.
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