Process

In conversation we are likely to talk of things or events.  We rarely, I find, speak of process.  Yet over time my life has become one of process, an interior existence, resulting from illness, infirmity and the realization that stillness has long been my natural state.   I find it difficult to answer the questions, "What's new?" or "How have you been?" for I have no external events to share.  Receiving an exciting order of drawing tools from Jet Pens hardly qualifies.  A quiet, process-centered life where the doing is about being does not leave one with much to report by ordinary standards of social exchange.

"Inner Space" by artist Anselm Kiefer.

Acknowledging and accepting habitation of this interior world is a process in itself.  It has taken time to be even mildly comfortable with a lack of news to offer when friends report of foreign travel, community functions, normal activities for the mobile and those whose assignments vary so widely from mine.  I continue to learn a new vocabulary to describe these states of being, to tell how intuition, when trusted, leads me to connections, to kindred spirits, to doors that open on caverns of discovery.  A message left yesterday by a friend in which he described being drawn unexpectedly to certain music and how much he has found there paralleled my growing love, for it is certainly more than infatuation, for red and the illustrators who use it lavishly.   I pictured an image of the calls we hear, if we pay attention to immediate and rather unlikely passions that rise like a sudden-onset fever, seeing them as mercurial, winged creatures that we chase down with sturdy, long-handled nets, knowing we are summoned for soul-based reasons we could only explain to a few, if any.  The language of process springs from the poets' realm.  It is a story that can only be told in metaphor.