THE MAP > MUSE : CONNECTION

The Art Of Removing Things

PART 2: CONNECTION & TRUTH

This second Muse has been very different, a very quiet and soft opening.

I remember to trust truth and remove each barrier to creation before I am able to construct it.

I let go.

I enter a liminal space.

And then I do enter a physical liminal space, I am isolating in my van on the South coast in Seaford, storms and sun passing each day, the sea a consistent view out of the window.

As I try to unpick what I am writing about, I remove the need to move into an academic or exploration of the subject and I relax again.

Like the waves falling in and out of force and flow.

Here we go.

“These days, it’s easy to feel that we’ve fallen out of connection with one another and with the earth and with reason and with love.

I mean: we have. But to read, to write, is to say that we still believe in, at least, the possibility of connection.”

― George Saunders

truth

/truːθ/ the quality or state of being true

A constant, a certainty

it has only itself to refer to

Truth
—
Held

Gravity

Sight | hearing | smell | touch | the senses

The tracing of the start to the same place in the sky each year

Trees growing

Birth

Truth serves as the anchor points for the ascent up the creative curve

Steps in conncection

Steps to decide what is true

What is it, the truth you are seeking to describe?

Quality?

Beauty?

“Quality...you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is.

But that’s self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There’s nothing to talk about.

But if you can’t say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn’t exist at all. But for all practical purposes it really does exist.”

John Pirsig - The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Truth recognises truth and everything else falls away.

At that point we find Connection

With a place

With nature

With a person

With an idea

With our senses

With creativity

With play

With a frequency

What do I really want to say. Truth is found in connection when you connect with a word or a deed or a piece of art, a person a place a vibration this is truth.

As an artist when you create a piece of work and it resonates with another, this is truth.

A layer of force is removed, ease opens up the space and connection occurs.

When we find or create connection we create quality and beauty in our lives.

It takes time, it requires shedding, removing, allowing.

Connection in artistic collaboration

The joining of voices, movement, visual, melodic, theoretical.

Someone to work through the resistance with. Others. The other.

The magic of joining minds.

I cast my mind back to the 2 tapestries we have made as a community.

Image

Voice

Working on the Muse for the last 2 years has been a collaboration with each author as well as the collective.

Each chapter an expression of truth.

This Muse collection continues to be so Meta.

What does it take to collaborate to connect?

To offer yourself.

To walk at the same pace, to push forward when necessary to help the other to access the points of connection required to create.

Respect. Trust. Fluid. Open. Adaptable.

The ability to let go, to turn mine into ours.

To match the heartbeat. To join in unison.

When we create with others when we are in connection with others.

In mutual delight

In shared grief

In unknown outcomes

When colours come together the individuals are removed and only the one remains.

Prism spectrum synchronises to white light.

Pigment colours synchronise to the colour of earth.

The peregrines hang on the wind. I feel the earth in ways impossible to them, as fish know the water in ways we cannot. The peregrines hover in the air, one behind the other; then, as if they’re feeling it with the same sense of knowledge that we take from sight, they find their moment, ride the opening within the air and are gone. They leave a gap in the mist, a place that fills with an understanding of the way another life form inhabits this earth.

Raynor Winn – Landlines

Where have you felt connection this week?

With yourself

With another

With a place

With a sensation or feeling

In order to connect, less is more we need to feel truth in pure form, a single note.

I heard on a radio show the following:

When ‘settlers’ use the word “ours” they are expressing that which is possessed or owned

When indigenous people use the word “ours’ they are expressing that which is shared

“It belongs to me”

becomes

“It belongs to us”

Be [longing]

CONNECTION

I am more than the history or circumstance given to me at birth

I belong to my life and my own self

To remove the longing for other and to work with what is

Truth

The last muse finished with a question

AND WHAT COMES NEXT?

The answer that came was:
practice and truth

Thank you as before for this process, for this permission to write and be witnessed in my expression.

With each volume I write I realise that this is a vehicle I am using to process the grief that is to come as my father enters his last days.

The way to climb the creative curve, the part where all the work is done, the part that grips and won’t let go, the persistence, the birthing is achieved by connecting with truth.

It’s the upward stretch that requires the work, the digging in, persistence, the galvanisation of the what, the why that makes the when that it happens in.

The commitment, the crystallisation the state change the realisation and just when you think you can’t go on, can’t give anymore to the process the clouds clear and everything finds its place, this is connection.

Remember that connection will always come, trust the curve.

We can use these points of truth as anchors to remove things and create clarity, simplicity, truth and connection.

A climbing anchor is a system made up of individual anchor points that are linked together to create a master point that the rope and/or climbers clip into to be securely attached to the rock face they are climbing.

Each time we arrive at a point of truth we connect to the state of truth.

This can be amplified by creating similar conditions to previous truthful encounters.

The same music, the same smell, the same sensation, putting us in a state of

flow

SEE

Photos of moments I have stood in true connection.

I wanted to choose a few and look at them through the eyes of another. Threw your eyes and ask myself what are these images to me?

and they are
a state of enquiry
an open question
a study

What do I need to remove to stay in connection?

distraction
force
judgement

How do we know when something is right?

AND THIS IS WHAT THIS MUSE HAS BEEN A MOMENT OF ENQUIRY AND CONNECTION IT HAS FELT JUST RIGHT

READ

Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass

This exploration has brought me to to read a text I always intended to make time for and wanted to share.

Great is the quality of truth in man,
The quality of truth in man supports itself through all changes,
It is inevitably in the man . . . . He and it are in love, and never leave each other.
The truth in man is no dictum . . . . it is vital as eyesight,
If there be any soul there is truth . . . . if there be man or woman there is truth . . . . If there be physical or moral there is truth,
If there be equilibrium or volition there is truth . . . . if there be things at all upon the earth there is truth.

O truth of the earth! O truth of things! I am determined to press the whole way toward you,
Sound your voice! I scale mountains or dive in the sea after you.

My words are words of a questioning, and to indicate reality;

The panorama of the sea . . . . but the sea itself?

Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.

All truths wait in all things,
They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,

If there be any soul there is truth . . . . if there be man or woman there is truth . . . . If there be physical or moral there is truth,
If there be equilibrium or volition there is truth . . . . if there be things at all upon the earth there is truth.

O truth of the earth! O truth of things! I am determined to press the whole way toward you,
Sound your voice! I scale mountains or dive in the sea after you.

This is the reason that about the proper expression of beauty there is precision and balance . . . one part does not need to be thrust above another.

Walt Whitman - extracts from Leaves of Green