On an encounter in the woods at dawn

And what it taught me about how to trust the process.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash though the deer I saw were roe not fallow, just to be accurate

This morning was a beautiful spring dawn. I woke early and walked up through the fields around the village into the edges of the beech wood, enjoying the quiet and the light and the birds and the luxury of a full hour before I had to get ready for work.

After 20 minutes or so I sat under an ancient beech that my daughter and I refer to as the ‘momma tree’ on one of her huge branches that fell in the storms last year.

I closed my eyes. But rather than the meditative moment I’d anticipated, my brain started racing, chasing around like the blue tits overhead. Work, money, life, what to have for breakfast or whether to have breakfast at all.

I persisted but after a while I ended up opening my eyes to escape the endless thoughts. I was about to berate myself for another failed meditation but right in front of me, in a beautifully framed clearing between the trees, two deer were mooching along. They were backlit by the rising sun and looked calm and elegant, picking their way through the long grass, their heads alternately dipping and lifting to scan the surroundings.

And just like that, there was the beauty and the moment I had been looking for and my mind just dropped the chatter as if to say ‘Yes, actually, that’s pretty cool’.

Isn’t that always the way? The harder we seek, the less we find.

The same with the art this week.

I can make lists, mind maps, plans.

I soak myself in Instagram and photographs of my own work.

I am still fully tangled up with a million possibilities and no clarity.

But as soon as I have the work in front of me and the materials in my hands, it all becomes clear. What is working, what I love and what I need to do next. My mind switches off as my hands get busy. There is relief then calm as the tangles in my mind just melt away..

I so should know this by now and trust that this will happen. Out of my head and into my body - works every time.

(Or as one of my 17 year old Fashion students told another student who was stuck with her project and not sure what to do, ‘Just trust the fucking process, will you?’ Slightly aggressive, but I get the point.)

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Yet there is still the urge in my brain to ‘sort it out’ ahead of engaging with the actual work, to go to the studio with a plan.

Part of this is a product of my day job mind. How conditioned we become to one way of thinking, even if it’s not natural to us. I am a college teacher and have been for over 30 years; if I’m not vigilant my working day revolves around planning, getting results and assessing progress. This isn’t the job as I live it day to day, which is all about building relationships with my students and coaching them as they find their way in life. But it is the surface level, management driven day job - one email or deadline and, if I’m not careful, I’m triggered and off in pursuit mode. And that does not sit well with creativity.

And part of it is getting used to having a studio. After all, I’ve had my studio for less than a month though it already feels like home. I am starting to trust that the energy and creativity will still be there when I go back, waiting for me where I left off. I am used to squeezing my work in around my life at home - both physically in terms of space, but also mentally. At home, I’m never really off duty. In the studio, I am in the zone and nothing seems to distract me. So I am slowly letting this realisation sink into my bones.

Allowing myself to relax into it. I think it is to do with energy. The building where I have my studio houses a dozen or so artists of varying disciplines. In terms of structure, it is an unexciting standard office block that has been repurposed by a team of creatives. But the energy is light, positive, energising like the beech woods at dawn today and already the spark of my own creativity has been nurtured and fed so that it has grown almost too big for the time I have available.

I think I need to acknowledge this is a time of transition, maybe my own spring coinciding with the earth’s burst of energy. I need to let myself be open to surprises and new directions. At the moment, a comment I made in my interview for Lindsey Tyson’s podcast, The Inquisitive Artist, has stuck with me. Lindsey asked about the significance of my environment and I said glibly that my work reflected how places made me feel but I doubted I’d ever be a ‘landscape artist’. Hmm. Interesting then that my playful sketchbook work recently has all been about landscape, specifically the open, fluid landscapes of the Norfolk reedbeds where I spend so much of my holiday time and where I went earlier this month, still raw and exhausted from the immense effort of finishing my degree, doing my first art residency and holding my first exhibition. The landscape just absorbed me and slowly restored me to myself so maybe it’s gratitude as much as anything else that has brought the colours and lines and feeling of the place into my sketchbook.

Surprising and beautiful, like the deer in the woods this morning, and again arising at a time when I had let go of the plans and the drive to complete and was content to just be.

Detail from my current sketchbook - it might not look like a landscape but it’s inspired by sitting alongside the Norfolk reedbeds, watching clouds and light and birds come and go.

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Do you recognise that deer-in-the-woods moment?

Again it feels like my life and my art having a conversation where they say ‘What do you think she needs to learn now? What is holding her back?’ and together they drum up yet another moment of insight to guide both my life and my art. If only I can be wise enough to graciously say thank you and absorb it, rather than stubbornly continuing in my old, must-plan-the-heck-out-of-this mode.

Writing this and in turn hearing about your own experiences helps remind me of what feels good and, of course, that I’m not alone in compiling this middle-aged list of ‘things I wish I’d known when I was younger’. Not in a regretful or bitter way but in a ‘determined to make the most of the next phase of my life’ kind of way.

I’d love to hear if this ‘waiting for beauty to arise’ resonates with you and if you have your own way of allowing it to happen in the middle of a busy, busy life.

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On the studio wall at the moment - seeing how the meditative pieces on cloth and canvas might speak to my newer, landscape-based sketches. It’s all very brown except those flashes of pink at the bottom, so expect to see the colour turned up as I explore this line of enquiry.