Finding the Still Centre

Wet paper pulp drying on a silkscreen

In meditation, you follow your breath in and out until you drift deeper down into yourself. 

I can feel my thoughts drifting, emptying as I spend more time with my innermost being.

For the past seven weeks I have been making circles of paper. Now I find that I have pursued this path so far, I no longer even remember those first tentative steps I took to get here. 

First works lead you into the creative process. Then the materials talk to you, whisper how they want to interact, where they want to take you if you trust and let go of control. 

Most mornings I go outside to make paper. The weather has been glorious and I have been making huge worlds of paper with swirling whites, greens and blues.

Now as I continue in this fashion I am going lighter, going deeper. I liken it to throwing a pebble into the stillness of a pool of water. Or the sun reflected in a puddle on the sand, shifting as my shadow crosses it, extracting into circles and lines.

I think of white noise, sound that is background, a sort of static lullaby. My paper is becoming quieter, stiller, whiter. White silence. A drop of blue and green in the centre, the still eye in the centre of swirling white hurricane. 

White on white, a whiter shade of pale, the white of garments worn by devotees at prayer. 

This is a paper prayer. A creative offering to the world, and to my practice. A prayerful gesture that takes me deep and deeper as I surrender to my practice.

I talk about going deeper in my creativity courses. To discover that little flame that is slowly burning inside, to feed it with the space and time for it to develop into a blaze of creative production that warms you from the inside out.

This is my offering to myself. A white still centre. A surrender to this time and my practice.

Works in progress, circles of bluey white handmade paper