Dear Collective Community

I want to talk to you about edges and I’m wondering if you can meet me there?

At the edge of:

The black and the white.
The grey lines.
The lines themselves.
The to and the fro.
The above and below.
The linear and non-linear.
The straight up and down.
The firm and the extreme.
The go and the do not pass.
The good and the evil.
The wrong and the right.
The heavens and the hells.
The Earth and the sky.
The justice and the revenge.
The science and the mystical.
The edge of you and the edge of I.
The edge of our stories.
Between waking and sleeping.

I want to talk with you about how our edges become so.⁠

What events inform the construction of our lines.⁠

When the lines form the walls of our castles.⁠

When the edges move from fluid into rigid and back again?⁠

When protection shifts into defensive.⁠

Do we even see our edges?⁠

Do we know where or what or who informs them?⁠

Do we know what lies on the other side of them?

Can we know them intimately enough to move beyond them?⁠

And can we all the while honour the marks they have left us with?

Can we celebrate the insights they have given us?

I want to talk to you about our edges.

“My most important problem was to destroy the line of demarcation that separates what seems real from what seems fantastic. Because in the world that I was trying to evoke, that barrier didn’t exist.”

- Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I have always found myself more comfortable skirting a little closer to the edges of things.
Living on the boundary between land and sea, nudging the rules, questioning common narratives, investigating at each end of my nervous system.
From just about any edge, I felt as if my vision appeared clearer and I was truly happier dwelling there.

I was always a little awkward as a child. It felt impossible to fit into any of the boxes it was assumed I’d at least visit for a while.
I drifted ghostlike through childhood landmarks, milestones, groups of friends - feet hovering just above the ground, unweighted and somehow unable to touch down.

My mother would delight in telling tales of me as a child to successive boyfriends:

“I’d find her in the corner, sitting for hours on end, playing happily with one solitary button. Never any bother at all!”

This was all in complete contrast to my brother, who’d spend the same amount of hours bouncing hyperactively, wall to wall. Quite literally tearing at them, pulling down strips of paper with wild eyes ablaze.
From opposite ends of our spectrums we would eye each other suspiciously, unsure how to meet in the centre.
Oblivious how to speak each other’s language.
Uncertain how to let our edges merge and blend.

I was never any bother because it felt safer to watch from the edge.
He was always a bother because he had no idea how to create a container.

I became an observer.
And that became my story.
That was my edge.
Until it became a wall that is.

“The artist then gives to the society
what a repressive authoritarian system takes from,
or deprives the society of.”

- Carlos Fuentes

These edges of ours and the stories and life events which build them are often our gifts.
It’s really no surprise that I became a yoga teacher.
A job dependant on observation.
A ready to wear identity, complete with its own language and rules. I could slip it on and hide out for a while.
For some time those parameters made sense and even offered safety.
But eventually the edges became high walls.
And more often than not, I would find myself up against them, wondering what might lie on the other side.

It is true that we are a product of our stories, that these stories create conditioning.
But it is our continued grasping identification with them that will cause the prolonged suffering.
Our stories shape and inform who we become and what we grow into.
But as life goes on, and our movies play out the same old scenes - those boundaries, those familiar edges may no longer offer the same security, privacy, stability or gifts they once did.

Think about your own story for a minute.

Who wrote it?

Why did it play out in that way?

Does the story still make sense?

Have you taken up residence within its walls?

What edges are you frequently coming up against?

I want to know when life became about choosing the right side?
I want to know when our our apparent adaptability camouflages the hard skin of someone in fear of commitment?
I want to know when freedom to move and change and adapt, shifts into escapism?
I want to know how the grey lines provide freedom for some and shade for others?
I want to know when we will stop pinning our ideas or thoughts about ourselves, onto the surface of another’s skin?

When our edges, whatever they hold or contain, become so defined and impenetrable, surely it’s time to bravely question their ongoing relevance?
Here we can choose to transcend what has been before.
If we can take the stories and learn to gently pull, stretch and tease them apart, like layers of fabric or the membrane of a cell, we can begin to explore a little further and in that new space a new exchange of information can occur.

And here perhaps, at the edge of you and the edge of I, a new language can be learned and spoken.

As Carlos Fuentes says about the great Frida Kahlo:

“She had invented her own language, her own way of speaking Spanish, full of vitality and accompanied by gestures, mimicry, laughter, jokes, and a great sense of irony”

At the edge of you and I, let’s meet there?

Something we are all undoubtedly experiencing collectively to some degree is loneliness.
Loneliness appears to have no outer edge. It begins to feel impenetrable.
Beyond the many distractions of everyday life, it’s as if some of us are now truly discovering what our edges feel like for the first time.
Where for a moment we stop insisting we are isolated and comprehend our loneliness.

Perhaps we have never known these edges in quite the same way.
We are arriving here quite unintentionally.
Maybe we have truly no idea what lies beyond the edge of loneliness, beyond the edge of anything we are experiencing?

Strong lines are being drawn for us and all around us and in some way that’s an important strategy but still, as people flock to place themselves within these lines, can we remember that the possibilities that reside on the other side for all of us are infinite and worth investigating.

At a time when our worlds are becoming smaller, how can we continue to actively expand our individual (and collective) world views?
Like going to a party and talking to all the people you’ve never spoken to before?
A time to listen to deliberately listen to the stories of others, to find a way to continue to express ours more truthfully, and sensitively, whenever the time comes?

Is it possible to hold multiple stories, multiple edges, multiple realities not just in our open and loving hands but in the skin and bones and flesh of us.

This is our Creative Muse.

I’ll leave you for now with the words of Kate Bush, whose work you’ll find below:

“It’s to do with other people’s perceptions of who you are, and what’s important to me is to be a human being, who has a soul and who hopefully has a sense of who they are, and not who everybody else thinks you are.”

Much love to you all and thank you for being here,

Naomi x