Lake at St Ives Bradford

Sketch a day - Day 238/365

Working short days. Trying to rest. Trying to work bits. Trying to work out what is enough. I suspect I am not sure what that is. How do you know when to stop? How do you know when to start? I am not sure I have ever quite worked that out. A dear friend left a message for me that I listened to today. Their words were so appreciated. Arriving just when I needed to hear them. Thoughts about the ways it feels impossible to stop and heal in this moment in late capitalism. That everything is set up to make us feel nothing but the impossibility of stopping. But it is not impossible.

I mean, I haven't stopped today but I have done less.

I have tried to listen to my own heart and work out what it wants. It's telling me. I just can't quite work it out yet.

I was thinking about that idea. That the experience of being alive can be split into the things you know, the things you know you don't know, the things you don't know you don't know.

For the first time, today it struck me there is also all of the stuff I think I don't know but really I do.

The stuff of heart valve and bone and tissue. The stuff that has been ignored so long it's language has been lost to me. The stuff that I need to reclaim.

I was thinking about all of that today.

I was thinking about 5 scenes of a new play that a writing squad writer sent me to read and how exciting this work is. How full of potential it is. How full of questions. Not a message. Not a fucking message in sight. I was thinking how wonderful it was to read this.

How words make me feel alive.

I was thinking about the meeting that Deborah and Lisa and Beth and I had this morning. An Otherhood pre rehearsal meeting online. And what a delight it was to talk and think together. And how that feeling of beginning to recede from the work has begun for me. How already the play is becoming theirs not mine. Or ours not mine. And how this process of giving up what one has written is always hard but also amazing. And a total privilege. To have your words taken and made to come alive. That is the kind of thing greek gods killed each other with lightning to gain.

I was thinking about William Kentridge and his black and red drawings. I think about his work at least once a day every day.

I thought about Jim Jarmouche (Jarmousche?) and his extolling for us all to copy everything we love and to do it freely and never to worry about being original but to focus on only doing what brings us joy.

Because if we do that, then the things we create will be authenticly us.

However hard you try and copy something or someone. If you do it with all of your heart, you won't be able to help making something only you could have made.

Or words to that effect.

And then i made some black and red drawings. And doing them made me happy.

And that - other than a reminder to keep saying (over again as we must keep saying) free Palestine 🇵🇸 - is the news.

No editing and I doubt I used enough commas or full stops and far too many ands. Here we are.