Hello, I’m Wendy Pratt; author and poet. I wrote a memoir, The Ghost Lake, about my experience of living on an ancient extinct glacial lake called Paleolake Flixton in North Yorkshire, and how I found my place in a long line of lake ancestry going back to the palaeolithic. I also wrote a poetry collection, Blackbird Singing at Dusk, a kind of sister project to the memoir.
After the solstice, after the witnessing of the sunrise on the cliff edge, the sea fret rising up and surrounding me - a little pocket of heat and flesh within the cold grey - after the strange, human- like grunts and groans from the seals below. After the walk back through the holiday camps, past the snoring tent-sleepers, past the early swimmers returning in dry robes; heads bent, sharing themselves with each other. After the sleek flank of a roe disappearing through a hawthorn, after the soft glow of the barn owl hunting, after the hares in the field and the, was it a grouse? Unusual. After the solitude of the sleeping village, and the coffee bubbling, I take up my pen and my brand new mid year planner, and I begin the second part of my solstice ritual.
Living in grief while we move through the year with my terminally ill mum is reminding me, always, that death will come for all of us. I’ve become acutely aware of the passage of time, speeding up year by year and I ask myself- am I happy? Am I where I want to be? Have I had a good life? If I died today I would I be happy with the life I’ve lived?
Yes: I have had such an interesting adventure, despite my anxiety and the problems it brings me - stopping me from doing so many things I would have liked to - there has been such beauty along the way, even in grief, even in the utter darkness there was a kind of beauty to be observed in the human experience, of the specialness of life. But I am not quite where I want to be.
Big thoughts for the solstice - but I do find that specifically setting out to witness an actual star rising as the earth turns does that to me. The witnessing reminds me that the planet is tiny, we are tiny, I am tiny, and that often I spend whole weeks in an agony of anxiety over something that doesn’t actually exist.
I am sick of being enraged. So often I find myself enraged at the way we have fucked ourselves over. After all those years of creative evolution, from the first hand print on a cave wall, all the way up to this brilliant, beautiful ability to share our experiences through art, through literature, and what do we do? We hand it over to people who want to use a set of algorithms dressed up as a robot with a cute name to plagiarise it and spew out something that has the pattern of art, but no human intuition. If it looks like art it’ll do. Pack it, price it, stick it on Amazon, make some content, sell sell sell.
We’ve devalued the act of creativity, we’ve made creativity look too easy. To be creative is to make mistakes, more and more until you grow into it. It is so uniquely human. It is hard wok, hard won.
Alongside the robbing of our own creativity we have created a system in which we spend a great deal of time in pain, and I feel like it’s getting worse. We’ve slowly moved towards a place where the norm of social media - and the media in general - is rage bait and anger and unkindness. The news now isn’t really news, social media isn’t really social.
The incentives all point in the same direction: create conflict, generate anger, feed resentment.
The London Economic
We’ve become so entwined with social media, with subscription plans, with stuff we can’t own, that I feel used. I feel helpless. I feel puppeted by a handful of very rich men with no concept of the actual world, no regard for it, no need for human creation, human beauty. I am sick of the rage bait. I am sick of the grifting and greed.
Yesterday, driving home from taking mum to an emergency GP appointment, I saw a big fat wood pigeon in the road. It was carrying an ambitiously long twig and was struggling with it. A woman driving in the opposite direction didn’t slow down. Perhaps she wasn’t aware that birds at this time of year are still focussed on nesting and aren’t as quick to get out of the way. She sped towards it, glaring at it. Get out of my way, get out of my way I am important, you are insignificant. It felt like all that rage bait and anger and the dreariness of being forced through this awful machine we’ve made for ourselves had condensed down to this point, the point at which a person cannot slow down, can’t bear to add one or two seconds to their journey to allow another being trying to live its life, to get out of the way safely.
I don’t want live like that. I want to live with more kindness, more beauty, more joy. I can only start where I am, look at what I am doing, how I am doing it.
I pick up my planner and begin to Marie Condo my life - mentally lifting each section up to see if it still sparks joy. This ritual feels more urgent this year as I’d got myself into a paralysing anxiety loop over some work I felt was necessary because it was paid. Over the last couple of years I have gradually been letting go of stuff that I feel I should do, but don’t actually enjoy. This, I think, might be the last bit. I go as far as using one of the precious note pages in the back of the planner to write a vow to myself, to tell myself that no matter how much the feeling of relief and happiness that washes over me after this work is complete convinces me I can ‘just push through the anxiety’ again, I will not do this again. I am parenting myself, saving myself from future bad decisions. I make a list of the sort of work that not only doesn’t spark joy, but actively causes pain. I put it in all capitals, put a red border round it like a warning sign. Do not cross into a place of so much anxiety again.
Next I make two columns headed Things I am Embracing, and Things I am Letting Go. On the list of things to embrace -
walking as part of my practice
reading as part of my practice
photography as part of my practice
A good feeling of solidifying ideas, of gathering the flashing light points in my brain into a permission slip of creativity. I do also feel a twinge of sadness that I am the sort of person that has to give myself permission to enjoy things. I add
having fun on social media.
I am considering leaving all meta related platforms. I saw a post recently by an artist that said they were sick of giving billionaires free content for their platforms, sick of allowing the platforms to use their creativity. A little bell of recognition went off in my head. But I’m not sure I’m quite there with it yet. I would miss the artists and writers and photographers, the short film makers, the creatives and the nature enthusiasts, the quirky folk and the walkers, the history lovers, the people keen to share themselves existing in the beauty of the world. I could do without the rage bait though.
Under Things I am Letting Go I add
Putting more than seven things on my To Do list
Using social media as dopamine
Excuses
There are other things on the lists that are too personal to put here, but for the most part this is about my work - the ritual is a kind of life audit, to see if I am living intentionally, working intentionally.
Life is too short. I want to age into a position of wiseness, I want to travel to the place in the ground that waits for all of us as a good observer of the unique beauty that being human is. I want to work like this too. I don’t want to fret myself into the ground in a ball of anxiety.
I give myself permission to dawdle and take photos when I go walking. I’m aware that my walking is my daily exercise, but I wanted to make it more than just getting steps in. I give myself permission to play too: to get up and throw shorts and sandals on, and no make up, and go take photos of the undersides of leaves and the textures in the landscape, playing with the photos to capture the feelings behind them, to capture the childlike quality of this sort of play. This is part of the human experience, and therefore is good for me as a creative.
I started making space in the day to read - for pleasure and for research. No longer cramming reading into just before bed, or as a kind of guilty pleasure taking me away from my work, I began to see it as essential to my work, and top my experience of being human.
I started being realistic with my To Do list. Seven things, because some things inevitably take longer either because they just do or because my brain will not function in the way I want it to. I need to give my day more space to expand into. I have recognised that when I am panicking about stuff, my To Do lists get ridiculous, I fail to prioritise, and just pile all the things on the list making me more panicked. I don’t want to live like that. Seven things, three of them non negotiable - walk, house reset, writing work for two hours daily. No excuses - I prioritise my writing work. And would you believe it - things feel more manageable. Nobody told me off for not doing ALL THE THINGS.
I started putting my phone in a drawer when I was working. This is a game changer, it really works. I hear the notifications going off, deep and echoey like they are coming from the hull of a ship and I notice the phantom limb response of my immediate reaching for my phone, and the fact that it is not at hand reminds me that I’m not going to use it for dopamine, and I don’t. And guess what? I am more focussed, happier, more in the moment, more aware of myself. Better concentration, a better life.
Some of these things `I have tried before and I won’t say I failed at them, because what I find is that sometimes I need to repeat a pattern often in order to rewire my brain. I will keep coming back to the root, to the source of these decisions - I want to live a good life - my definition of good is intentional, creative.
What sort of a life do you want to read?
Thanks for joining me.
Until next time
x
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The next Dawn and Dusk Chorus sessions are on Tuesday 28th July
7-8am and 6-7pm UK time
My next live workshop is also in July on Wednesday 15th 7-8.30pm UK Time
We’ll be looking at how to put the surprise into poetry - how to jolt the reader out of a passive experience.
This workshop is completely free to paid subscribers of Notes from the Margin, but I’m also offering a payment version - £20 - for non members. Here’s the link to the eventbrite page. If you’re a paid subscriber to Notes from the Margin you don’t have to book, you’ll automatically receive the zoom link just before the event.
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