by tashmcgill | Apr 27, 2016 | Culture & Ideas
‘You can read it, if you like.’
(The story written to explain the chapters of life before now, where we intersect.)
He said it with nonchalance and maybe because the words were light leaving his tongue but heavy by the time they landed in my ear, I was struck off-balance. I imagine at least, that the words were not heavy with meaning for him, because how would I imagine that those words leaving his lips are as costly for him as they are valuable to me on hearing them?
They landed in my ear and my hand at the same time, little stones dropped into a lake and their ripples sweeping out and down my limbs.
I do not trade in stories lightly, I want to tell him. I hold the stories of others as precious as I hold my stories close. Stories are secrets and trust and truth.
Truthfully, my stories are kept safe behind a tall, brick wall. Stories of my doing, they are like climbing roses on the outside of the wall. Pretty, sweet and sometimes funny I can tell these stories easy and only those who pay close attention will see the bricks behind the flowers.
Lately, I have been thinking about taking some of those bricks down.
Beyond the brick is a wild garden. It is fragrant and sweet, full of fruit and nut trees. There is a river through one corner and the sun falls nicely on the grove of trees. It is both wild and well-tended and it cannot be defined as one thing or another. It is not English nor tropical. It is all things, all being, all stories in their raw and imperfect state. Unfiltered, unrestrained.
Lately, I have been thinking about taking some of those bricks down.
It means something to me, this exchange of the wild, unbound stories. Stories are trust; credit in the bank of understanding. Not understanding as assurance of anything but acceptance and the safe bravery of being Known.
Grace and meaning come from trading stories in my world. Knowing your stories is one step closer to knowing you, the real you – outside the carefully polished mannequins we live inside. At least, I assume it is that way with others, as it is that way with me.
It is a precious thing to hold somebody’s story in your hand. And it is never one story but a collection of tales that weave together one and then the next and the one after. You can traverse sideways, backwards and forwards through the story of another; moments of history and glimpses of the future. So one story could mean all the stories, if you navigate well.
“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.” James Baldwin
I keep a rose garden, that grows on a brick wall. The roses thrive on the sun, strapped in obedient lines against a sturdy spine. Well-practiced stories chosen for each moment. A careful selection of which practiced line is safe to use.
Here is the secret, buried in the brick. If I say the wrong thing, tell the wrong story, express the wrong feeling or tell you what I think before I know what you expect, need or want for me to say – then you, whoever you are, will disappear. A terrifying fear that I am responsible for my aloneness by never being the right thing; good enough, funny enough, wise enough, sweet enough, fierce enough, never enough.
Not an uncommon secret, but mine nonetheless.
Beyond the brick, there is a garden I have come to love. I’ve been living in it, behind the wall my whole life. And lately, I have been thinking about taking down the bricks.
There are some brave and patient ones who have made it far beyond the bricks. They have found crevices through which to crawl. For them, the wild and untamed self delights uninhibited. The storytrader gives freely there and the garden is bountiful. People eat and find shelter and laugh and love is made the whole day long and into the night. The land is good. I peek over the wall and through the window in the gate I hid so well and wonder now, whether I dare wait for those intrepid enough to make their own way through the wall.
Life beyond the brick is good and sweet and sensual and gritty. Lately, I have been thinking about opening the gate or taking down the bricks.
by tashmcgill | Apr 9, 2016 | Poems
When does discovery end? How do you know when you have learned enough or all things? I think ‘discovering’ is a present art; could we not practice it endlessly, traversing ever deeper and higher and wider? When can you say you are known or know another enough? We are ever-changing, ever-expanding and always being re-shaped by our being known and knowing another.
19th
this then, is how it can be
in the midst of a storm on the sixth day
of the seventh week but only the 19th hour
now making a star map from definitions
this then, is how it can be to know
but not make knowing a cage
instead just knowing, a long intention
and a longing for safe and true and kind
but knowing is measured so differently
this then, is how it can be to halt abruptly at the pass
the knowing and unknowing
one counts in minutes and hours and questions and answers and singular actions
and the other measures the expanse of singularity
like the universe, one ever expanding idea of another
a deep, blue diamond erupting from an earth stone
a long unceasing listen and look
this then, is how to see one thing as another
by definition of all things and nothing
a half of a half and a whole and an inversion
an upside-down moon, to see a star and not a starry sky
this then, is to kiss your counting – minutes, hours, touches, questions
with a soft, warm, expanding idea to hold them all
your knowing which is one thousand cuts in a stone chiseling me out
and my knowing one gleaming stone that holds the deep ocean and expanding sky
this then, is how it can be
to learn to count stars and the passing of time
in hours, words, questions and answers and
the size of an idea by the weight of warm navigation
from 19 to 20.
by tashmcgill | Apr 7, 2016 | Culture & Ideas
I’m trying to make space in my life right now – space to have moments with people and in places, to have moments at home, because space demands to be filled. And I’ve learned where there is space demanding to be filled, something will come along to fill it. Space is what allows us to be open and to encounter the new in the everyday.
People. Ideas. Thoughts. Perceptions and patterns. Stories. Characters. Relationship and connection.
And this is why I always find new ideas or new perspectives while travelling. I’m open because travelling strips away the responsibility and burdens of everyday life, creating vast openness. I don’t have to decide anything but what to watch or when to sleep or where to explore in my rental car. The same principle works in retreating: an escape from the noise and clutter. A filtering and rebirth into wide open spaces.
It is universal; the artist will tell you without space, creativity cannot happen. And by creativity, I don’t mean the abstract state or the manner of being – I mean the gritty, raw practice of making. Making of words and songs, poems, ideas, new intentions, new ways of thinking and seeing the world. All of that is the product of making.
When I travel, the space clears for me. I am one of those clichéd writers that can produce great work on a plane or a train. I think and then I write, and thinking happens well in those metal tubes. I dictate story lines and sing melody lines into my phone, saving every drop of making that is in me. I have a habit of falling in love with fascinating ideas (and occasionally people) right before I travel anywhere. There’s something about leaving a place that makes me want to hold on to it, even if my return is imminent. A fragment of home that I can carry with me. What I’ve learned is that every journey leaves a mark on me this way, it carries its own theme and everything I see or touch or taste while I am travelling carries that mark on it.
So space happens in the movement, in the between, in the transitions between train stations on the way, on highways or in airport lounges. It is peace, to a busy mind. I retreat inward and while my smiles remain gracious, my words become few. The interior dialogue between alter-egos dominates all and ideas pour forth. Space happens on the long, twisting back roads of a foreign land and in days spent in silence because you do not have the language of the place.
Space, because the clutter of what you are used to seeing is stripped away. Your mind can wander freely and your eyes see things – new.
For example, there is a man in a well-cut suit drinking coffee at the cheap café in the center court of the transit lounge. He has status privileges but he hasn’t taken advantage of them. I can tell why. He has the look of a man who is thinking of home, his eyes fastened on the handbag store across the hall. He is thinking about how his wife, whose blue eyes look particularly weary and love-worn lately, might like the one in peach. It’s a practical but fashionable design and it would go with the dress she was wearing the last time he was home; which might have been last week or maybe last month. Maybe it was the second to last time he was home.
Either way, I wish I could tell him, yes – she would love the handbag but he should just send her a letter. A letter to tell her he is sitting in an airport on his way home and he is not thinking about how the meeting went or whether he thinks Rob will close the deal. No, he is simply thinking of her and whether he has done enough to keep her love this month, because he worries so that his absence is too much and too often. He fears becoming one of those men whose love fades away before his eyes because of inattention. He could simply write that and send it to her. Sign it ‘much love from Changi Airport, Singapore.’ And he could do it from the next airport too.
‘Dear Grace, I am thinking of you and that orange dress you were wearing. I like how you wear that dress and I am coming home soon. Please be there, because you are home to me. I am doing my best and I think you are doing yours; let’s carry on.’
There’s a story in that and some truth about how we relate to one another, how we long for one another. How we try and how we fear failure even in the midst of circumstances that should provide us with security and hope.
Or the young man in well-worn denim and faded t-shirt but brand new shoes. Shoes so pristine they must still be giving him blisters. He looks nervously at his travel wallet for the third time, lifting his phone to the horizon a couple of times and checking his watch. He is all coiled energy, anticipation and anxiety. His eyes are unable to stay in one place too long because his thoughts are stretched between here and there, wherever he’s headed to. His carry-on looks uncomfortably full and he has not one, but two hoodies wrapped around his waist. Ah, I see it now. He is travelling from home for the first time and doesn’t intend to return home anytime soon. He’s not just travelling, he’s planning on landing somewhere for a while. These shoes were one last splurge before he has to face the challenge of finding a job or making new friends and becoming accustomed to life away. Sure as the sun rising, he’s wondering if it’s too soon to let his parents know he’s made it this far.
The man sitting in the café, thinking about his wife.
The young man moving to a new country, alone for the first time.
The girl travelling to her sister’s wedding, feeling alone.
The child gazing out the airport window, beginning the first inkling of a dream to be a pilot.
The woman who hosts travellers every day, but has never left her island home.
Without distraction, the mind falls to thought more intentionally than you realise. If you pay attention, it is a wonderful way to discover what matters to you. First your happy thoughts will come to you, followed by your fears and then whatever is making you hopeful. Once you have worked through all of those things, then you might discover what sadness you are carrying. Go even further and you will find yourself at the deep, deep happiness, where you are completely yourself.
I discover myself, at the end of the silent-not silence and the travelling spaces; still myself. A storyteller. A poetry-lover, wanderer and mystical romantic. A hopeful idealist, pragmatic optimist. I am home; in my skin and my places. I have space now; I have made space for the new and whatever stories that will give me to tell. You live with yourself at the end of the day, no matter where you are. So be brave enough to be yourself – complex, simple, passionate, chilled out … Whoever you are, be unapologetically yourself. Be yourself as a friend, yourself as a lover. Be a fighter for that which you care about. Be a giver of whatever you have. Be you. Please. The world is better that way.
I have travelled all the way to here – home where I began, to begin again. Life is after all, beginning after beginning overlapping and colliding with each other.
by tashmcgill | Mar 31, 2016 | Prose & Poetry
Distance, figuratively through a lens or over physical miles, brings a focus and perspective to the human experience; particularly in my case to a sense of connection and disconnection. When I am away, in those first few moments and days of separation, whether I am leaving behind home or returning to it – I feel this tension of being pulled apart. My voice here is that between lovers, but really, it’s the cry of what feels like home anytime you are separate from those who welcome you, who bring you back to yourself.
So here, a series of poems at a distance and what it is like to feel that connection and disconnection over miles or through a lens, from that which we love and which calls us home.
i.
Kiss me one thousand kisses
A single drop at a time
Kiss me under moonlight, rain and sky
Kiss me sweetly in the morning
Graze my cheek as you come and go
I will count each one as offering
I will learn it we go
Kiss me to finish an argument then end it anyway
Your thoughts are as fierce as your lips sometimes
I am learning you best this way
Let me taste the kindness on you
Let me taste til I’ve drunk you in
When I am drunk enough on you at last, one thousand kisses done –
Then give me one thousand more,
Til kisses are breathing and words and knowing
Til you can’t take them back.
Kisses like water when they are true
Healing the dust and the ash of you
Kiss me with your mind in the morning, touch me with thought all day
I am yours one thousand times over, in each single turn through space.
ii.
There is a curve of you
Where the light rests and if I could
touch you there, quietly
just a caress of atoms and
feel you breathe, life within you
I would rest complete.
But though your body rests
beside my body during conversation
You are beyond reach just now
holding yourself together
just where I want to hold you.
Release yourself, I demand
But it is whispered like a prayer.
Oh, how I long to touch the light in you.
iii.
In my dream I am half of nothing
And whole of a whole
I am the tree and the bud
One round curve kissed by light
Another curve in shadow
Half of nothing is the difference
And the whole of a whole is complete.
It is a sweet dream to be touched by the moon and caressed by darkness
When one is your hand and the other is also yours.
iv.
Touch me again with your eyes
Let me soak in your voice
A little longer, a little closer
The timbre of your pitch humming in the air
Whisper closely and touch me with a word or two
But do not touch me
I do not want to touch you more than a whisper
Not yet, not today
Today is the long, slow luxury of not touching what I want to touch
After tomorrow, I will have only to remember what it was like to wait on you, fingers, hands, lips
The hidden corner between your shoulder and neck
I should like to live there a while
Resting on your pulse, rising on your breath
So, just – there.
Yes, your fingers are gentle and go no further
Touch me but do not touch me yet.
v.
This is the view of my weary heart
Another hotel room with crisp sheets
Only one side of the bed will warm
and I reach endlessly into white blindness in the night
It matters not that you do not share my bed when I am home
My mind is warm with the thought of you so the bed is emptier while I am away
My thoughts return to you, no doubt sleeping on the other side of the earth.
You are all imagination to me now, too far away to be real, a phantom in the night when I long for home;
I chide myself now home is something, someone I do not know.
I cannot claim to know how you would lie beneath these sheets
Or occupy this space with me
But you do occupy it, softly, insistently.
I push back against your presence in my mind and wonder if you feel me occupying your spaces or feel me in your dreams.
I still myself against this ocean of pristine cotton; think only what is real.
I will pass this day and the next one too; I have lived long not knowing you –
I can sleep alone.
vi.
I am sleeping under the stars in the Czech Republic
Which has known so many names
for one small piece of earth.
I too, have many names.
Long, short, punctuated and sentimental.
Soft names and hard names made of history’s sad stories.
Like this land I breathe and walk on, I cannot direct you north or south on it or point you to clear winds.
Like this body, I cannot whisper how to map your way through me, my great city of Names.
Perhaps do what no other has, carve me a map of myself using only your name; the name you choose for me.
vii.
Sleep, love but do not sleep –
instead dream.
Dream hard and long and wild, no pretend
that dreams are mild or mannered things.
No, a dream is a phoenix of the day passed
and dragon of the day to come.
A dream is what carries you to me in the dark
between oceans and thoughts.
More than an imagining now, you’ve left some
thread of yourself on me
now in the dark, my mind can paint you in a dream
one thousand times over.
I need never be lonely but to
dream and remember you.
Sleep, love but do not sleep
dream of me instead in whatever colour
I have left upon your chest
or written in your mind.
Dream hard and long and wild
and meet me there in the long dusky cloud.
Sleep so I can reach you in my sleep.
by tashmcgill | Oct 14, 2015 | Culture & Ideas
People talk a lot these days about writing your own story. Owning your chapters of failure, growth, success and moving on. But in it all there’s one question that a writer is prone to ask, therefore I assume most people are asking. If we are writing our own stories.. how do you write an ending? What do you say and how do you face the night that comes? How do you approach the dawn?
It might be the ending of a chapter or the end of an act. Maybe it’s the very end of the story arc, where one character departs the scene for good.. how do you avoid the mistakes that writers make? How do you avoid falling into the trap of believing life in the fairytale version, instead of how things truly are? How we write is often how we live, so there is much to learn about how we face the seachanges of life from how we might tell our stories.
You can’t write it too happy.
Too happy means it’s not real. Too shallow, too fast, too tidy and it won’t ring true. It’s too contrived to tidy every loose and wrap up every moment with joy and glee. We’ve all seen those movies and read those dime-store novels that float away into nothingness at the end. There are winners and losers in life; big or little loss. An ending must always come with some grief, otherwise we’re not really saying goodbye. No matter how ready, how ripe, how meaningful the closing of one story is, there
In life, there are loose ties left behind and there is messiness left behind in the wake of the happiest of endings. It’s this messiness, the contrasting shadow across happiness that proves the mirth of an ending. We know the truth of things by the way they contrast with the ‘other’. So you can’t expect for any ending to end too happily. Let yourself off the hook. Some stories have messy endings, some things are irrepairable. It’s in the leaving of things undone, we know we are finished. A little scar to leave behind is crucial to believe that it was real. Happiness is coloured with sadness, always.
You can’t write it too sad.
Life is joy and sadness. When all things are equal, the human experience demands a silver lining in every circumstance. You do not have permission to write a scenario without some glimmer of goodness. It does not have to be hope but it must be metered gratitude; a finding of the light in the midst of darkness. Humanity demands optimism; even a fragment of it. Heroes are born from characters that choose to do what they can with what they have. That is the essence of writing light into a story. Some fragment of goodness, hauled from the worst wreckage of life.
To overcome, to survive, to keep on playing requires this ruthless devotion to optimism. Beyond youth, optimism is not inherent. Optimism and hope is a feat of human engineering; willing the mind and spirit to play along. You must write an ending, you may not allow it to happen to you. Without our interference, without our part to play – endings are too dark. They jar with the human consciousness and the creating nature we are born into; to always make new, to birth again, recreating.
So you have but one choice when writing an ending.
And then.
Nothing ends. Time is the cadence of the story you write and time continues on. One chapter ends and you must simply write another. Your chapters and authorship finish and your memory passes to another. Whether your lover, your child, your successor – when your authorship is done, that writer will have to say ‘and then’. There is always a next, until the Big Finish.
My lover left me. And then, I got up the next day. Or, and then I slept for four months straight.
Every ending has the capacity to be defined by the ‘Next’. Captured in the ‘and then’.
If we are cowardly, we will try to tidy our loose ends and let things end tidily. If we are foolish, we believe others feel the weight of our failures and tragedy as we do.. we cannot image the ‘and then’. But someone, somewhere will always be responsible for it. Picking up whatever ever is left and making the best of it.
And that is the only ending we can ever write for ourselves.
No matter what trauma or delight has come your way – success or tragedy; you must wake up in the morning and begin with ‘and then’.
There is always something else to come. It may not come easy. you may have to define it, fight for it or simply let it unfold.. but until your dying breath for every goodbye and every ending, you must respond with ‘and then’.
What will you do tomorrow when your work is done? What will you do tomorrow when you are let go from your job or your lover leaves you or you are simply bored with what you have. Whenever you reach an impasse or an end, you simply have permission to say ‘and then’. Begin a new chapter, a new story. And how will you begin it? It begins with ‘and then’. Wherever you go, encourage people to remember that when your time is done they too, should simply say ‘and then’. We are all waiting to become the ‘and then’.
For the writers.
This is also true for you. Your characters must reflect the 3D nuance of what it is to be human. We feel it all at once. Joy and tragedy. True characters will reflect that. Embrace the ‘and then’. Your heroes will not be struck down by tragedy but they may be ruined by it for a time. It’s human, real. It’s true.
