I have my own theory around the ‘law of attraction’ which has a lot less to do with the popularised version of ‘how to attract your heart’s desire’ (for which read ‘your ego’s wish’) and a lot more to do with how your soul attracts what you need.
Of course, you’re welcome to call it co-incidence. You’re welcome to call it shaping events after the fact.
For all I know it might be one or other or a combination of those things, but I choose to believe in something I call ‘soul’ simply because I have no better word for something intrinsic to the individual that I do not understand: something that is the essence of who that person is in this lifetime. I choose to believe that said essence or soul or deep-rooted individuality knows far better than our conscious mind what it is we need, in the moment and in the longer term, and it calls out for it – without us necessarily knowing that it is doing so.
I choose to believe that the universe (or spirit, or what you might call a god or goddess) responds.
I might underline that word ‘need’. This isn’t about desire or wants or wishes. This is about something deeper. This is about our life’s purpose, whether or not we know what that is, whether
or not we even believe in the concept. What we want and what we need are not always the same thing. Wants and desires come from the mind. Needs come from somewhere deeper.
The problem we have is that when we set intentions, we’re not always sure where they originate.
So it is that I come back to the sea.
After months of stalling and not really moving it forward, I come back to my Dad’s notes and settle back in to typing them up, weaving my own commentary around them. I even send out a first-draft of the first hundred pages to a stranger, with a message along the lines of ‘you said you might be interested in reading’.
That reader’s first skim and quick response tells me they will be a critical reader. I’ve only skimmed it but the first things I notice… as in the first things that they notice that are wrong.
OK. I remind myself that is a good thing. I also remind myself that I sent it out, not for deep comment – but oh, what a blessing if they’re willing to – but rather just to see if it was even remotely interesting to anyone but me.
They come back later with an overall positive…an encouraging list of the things they liked. Not a deep dive, probably correctly, but a ‘maybe’ in terms of what I would need to do next if the project is ever going to go the full haul.
I send it out to someone else, who has no specific interest, to see if there is anything generic in here that will make it worth pursuing on a level above my own interest.
I send out a research enquiry…and then I put it to rest for a while. I take a step back.
After months of being in-landed, I head out to the islands. Not my island, but one that calls almost as deeply. I write about wanting to be islanded, wanting to be surrounded by water, wanting my ‘space’ to be curtailed by coastline. I start writing stories again. I come away wanting to go back, to explore further, and not knowing when I might do that.
I swim in clear, cold seas.
I walk among jellyfish.
I notice how you cannot trust your sense of sea-light for direction, when you’re surrounded by sea.
After an unmeasured break I go back to the North Norfolk coast. To sit on shingle. To breathe in sky. To try (and fail) to write, but then I come away surprised at how many words I have put down, even if I don’t yet know what to do with them.
I watched sea-anglers on the beach. I walked cliff paths. I lamented not being neck-deep in the North Sea – but remembered being in the clear island waters of the Atlantic and looked forward to being back in the cliff-green depths of Fermain Bay.
Everything I am doing is calling me back to the sea.
On my first session back in my writing group, we are led down to simply sit on the beach, be with the sea, tell about the sea, about what it means to go back down to the sea, sea poems, sea prose, sea words, sea shingle, sea sounds, swimming, softness, shifting, sorting, sky… I sit on the beaches… with writers and on my own… I watch the waters…I listen to the air.
I try to photograph butterflies and sand martins. Who am I kidding?
I photograph stones and seaweed. They too shift and insist on being out of focus.
But mostly, I simply sit. I look at this small patch of water, that is part of the whole encircling sea, and thread of rivers and lakes and waterfalls, and evaporation and precipitation, the life-blood of my planet pooling beneath my feet.
People ask me ‘what is it about the call of the sea?’
If you have to ask the question, you will not understand the answer.
But then again, maybe, if you’re willing to ask the question, you’re on the way to the point where you will understand. I am feeling strongly the call of the sea, and I am not fully understanding it either.
Something happens. An ordinary something, a pissing me off something, a something that keeps me awake at night, and stirs so much unnecessary, unhelpful emotion – call it anger, or fear, or offense – so much of it that I do not know how to come back to my own centre.
But my ‘soul’ knows. Somewhere deep inside, I know that when my surface becomes chaotic, when I lose my hold on my inner narrative, what I need to be doing is reading a very specific book and I reach into my subconscious to figure out which book that is.
On this occasion it turns out to be: Threads: The Delicate Life of John Craske. (Julia Blackburn)
This book was published ten years ago. It has been on my to-be-read heap for at least a year, maybe two. I bought it the day we went to visit The Shell Museum at Glandford. I bought it on the strength of the word ‘fisherman’ and of a few naïve (but actually deeply observed) images of boats
and water and sky. I bought it because embroidery is an art-form that I never mastered but deeply respect, the ability to catch emotion and movement in a few stitches. I bought it because this is my adopted landscape. I don’t live on the coast, but I live in the county. I wasn’t born here, but I have lived all my adult life here. I have walked that coastline and watched it change, year-to-year and over the decades. Craske himself lived most of his life away from the sea, even though it was the sea that he most desperately needed.
I bought the book and left it on the shelf, until it demanded that I read it.
You see, I don’t think we find books. I think they find us. They know that we will need them…and they will wait patiently until that need is strong enough to demand that now is the time to pick them up.
In my latest internal whirlwind, I needed Julia Blackburn talking about her search for the life of John Craske. Her book both is and is not a biography of the artist. It is a tapestry of her search for Craske and his life; it is a melding of her own life as a writer, as a researcher, of someone wandering around this landscape that I know so well and not-so-well.
In reading, I am meeting Julia Blackburn and all the people she meets, just as much as I am meeting John Craske. I am meeting my old friends: the places of this shifting coastland. They are friends rather than neighbours, but ones that I visit often.
More importantly, as I wander through familiar, and half-familiar, and unfamiliar streets and museums and beaches and marshes and backwaters and shingle-backs, and I listen to street scenes of towns, and early mornings and all the weather that comes and goes, I am learning how to write – to write things as they are, and not how I set out to write them. I am learning (again) to get out of my own way and let the thing write itself. I am learning that ‘delicate’ is a many-stranded word.
And through it all, I am hearing the call of the sea.
I read the book in three sittings, over two days. It gentles me. It shows me how long it takes to create something. It shows me that there is no rush, no urgency, there is only the slow ebb and flow and the coming and going and the finding and losing of things. It shows me that the sea story I’ve been working on for so long will not become whole until I allow it to tell me what its shape is, which might not be the one I had in mind. It shows me that I must intertwine it with working on other things because it may take much longer yet.
I have reached the end of the primary material I brought home with me nearly a decade ago, and I and surprised at how far from the final disembarkation it leaves me. Perhaps I need to leave it where he does…my father…signing off again…knowing he will sign back on. Perhaps I need to leave him at sea, where he had lost interest in the project, or found it harder and harder to remember stuff.
The sea is still calling me.
My deeper past is still calling me.
But now I no longer have my father holding my hand.
I have only the barest bones of voyages: start date / end date / ship name & nature – and whichever stories I can still dredge from my own salted down memory.
I came away from Threads with many of the things that I suspect Blackburn would have hoped for – about the life, about the art – but I suspect the reason the book insisted I read it right now had more to do with her craft of putting such a thing together. That was what I had to learn from. How to write such a book. How long it might take to write such a book. How to remember to live the rest of
your life while you’re doing so.
I have a lot to learn, on all fronts.
