Feeling your way

When the way is not clear

The path beside the Valira d’Orient river in El Tarter, Andorra.

I have many drafts in my Substack drafts folder, they are building up like silt. I start posts, go quite a way in, then leave them languishing. Not because they’re no good, or not interesting (to me and hopefully to others) but because something somewhere is getting snagged and I can’t quite work out what. Then there was the piece I deleted by accident. The longer pieces that require a long gestation, a deep composting. It’s one of those times when the path forward isn’t quite clear, when I’m not sure which way next.

The river is still there, flowing onwards, whether we walk alongside it or not. When I started writing The River Path I wanted to create a place of solace and balm, a place that gave the sense of someone, through words, being alongside. Sometimes that writing comes in a whoosh, in one fell swoop. Other times it’s slow, painstaking work. And other times it’s like this, when there’s something underneath but I can’t quite reach or touch it. There is a layer on top, which is slightly fuzzy, slightly numb.

This sensation is not particularly comfortable; it’s got too much unknown in it for that. All my usual tricks aren’t working - I’ve tried writing and moving and dancing and walking and talking and drawing. And while I’ve dropped down to the place underneath, I haven’t yet found the words, not in any shape where I can go ‘ah, here you are!’.

This feeling can be disconcerting, especially in a culture that values production above all. It would be easy to walk away, to say a version of ‘what’s the point, I’ve got nothing to say’. But I know from long experience, and hours on the dance floor, that that is not the practice. That when you stay long enough with this fuzziness, which has a good dose of boredom mixed in, there are often great riches underneath. But you need to stay in the fuzziness without straining and reaching, even though you strain and reach despite yourself. This is hard to do when you just want the uncertainty to end and to have a sense of ‘aha’, the ‘here I am, deep in the slip-stream rather languishing about in the shallows’.

Sometimes we have this feeling about a project or piece of work, sometimes it’s about relationships, or our days, weeks and months or lives more generally. But the river is always moving, even when it looks completely still, even when we are in the slow backwaters. Even when we can’t see the path.

So I reread Theodore Roethke’s poem The Waking, written in 1953. A poem that has long been handwritten and pinned on my noticeboard. It is a villanelle, and the form perfectly matches the looping feeling of going back to go forward. Of feeling your way.

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.   
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?   
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.   
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?   
God bless the Ground!   I shall walk softly there,   
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?   
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;   
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do   
To you and me; so take the lively air,   
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.   
What falls away is always. And is near.   
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   
I learn by going where I have to go.