the pause continues

It's shocking for me to pause. Ever since I started image-making again, I've been compelled, albeit gently, albeit not necessarily for hours at a time, to keep going. To not fall back as I did so many times before... scared of giving up in the face of the uncertainty of it all, and the strangeness of my chosen practice of trying to 'sit in a room and wait for something to happen' (Anish Kapoor).

I've thought of it recently as 'making space for things arising'. Forcing, intention, trying, pushing, are all quietly shown the door.

Who says that only the actual making of an image is 'working', or whatever it is that this thing is, my life, my correct life, the life that was always trying to breathe itself through me?

In the discomfort of the pause, I strive to stay awake. To stay with it, to feel everything that's present at the same time, all the layers of it, without the release of satisfactory doing.

And one thing that has arisen is the idea of pausing to look at what has appeared over nine years of this process.

These images are communications. They carry a mystery. This whole process is a communication, carries a mystery.

It doesn't do to hurry such things.

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