An important stage, the space where something vital happens: it's the pause where, as in music, the last sound has ended and, in the inner resounding silence, the new tone is being prepared. It's also like the night between two days, when we sleep and our spirit finds nourishment to replenish us for another day.
It's a time of surveying the newly learned so it may become our own. It's a time of assimilating and intensifying what is not yet truly our own, so that it may become so. And more still, that it may become something that might transcend my subjectiveness and extend to something more objective and universal, so that others may be touched and moved by it.
How long, such a transitional stage?
Here it follows the Art Party; last year it followed my Tonbridge School Art Residency.
How ever long; what ever time it needs. And not lose courage or trust while nothing tangible comes about.
Endings are impactful; transition can be painful at times. But this time of sifting, sorting and waiting, with patience and trust, brings about an intensification. When enough inner work has been done something renewed emerges out of the nurturing silence.
'The reward for patience is patience.'
I have come to find nothing negative in silence; it is an absence of sound, a positive absence. It is a positive, complete world in itself. It is pure, eternal. Nurturing. Finding it, returning to it is to reconnect with an eternal source to replenish myself from its mysterious well of creativity.
Much goes on in this silence, unseen, unperceived (temporarily). Much goes on in this in-between stage.
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Some final images given to me just recently, taken on the second day of the Art Party by Jo Crowther, a photographer from Lewes, East Sussex, and friend of fellow-sculptor Caroline. Too glorious - masterly - not to log them here.
