Making space for emergence means keeping watch for what you might encounter in what is left behind. You remove things, pass them over, discard or rearrange them. New configurations take time to become used to.
Like new shoes, they can be uncomfortable at first. I have found that being aware of what might be changing, or coming forth is a process of listening, looking, feeling. Being embedded in the present moment in order to perceive its shape and tone.
As for drawing or painting, the first marks can often sketch out the shape of something coming, even though it is not yet possible to discern the final form or how it will be at the end of this process.
I have been unhappy with aspects of my life for a long time now. I don’t want to include the detail here because it is too personal for a public forum such as this, however I can feel the first marks of change beginning to be put down on the spaces that I am making in my life. Even writing again is stilting, slow and difficult.
I write about making space and have thought deeply about what this might mean. It occurs to me that I don’t actually know what ‘space’ might mean as a definition. The dictionary doesn’t help. It is too technical to pin down or associate with the feeling that I hold in my chest. This sensation is heavy, making my shoulders drop and my heart ache. I don’t like this feeling or what it might mean. As I stop to think, holding my chin in my hand, I feel my feet twitching, discreet stimming with my toes. This is a habit I have held since childhood to process discomfort discreetly so that my movement would not offend adults or else bring me to their attention.
Perhaps, then, it is not the space that I must attend to, but these first marks. Not made on a page but, experienced as traces or fragments of emotion, sensations. An embodied nature of first marks that are tentatively expressing themselves onto my ‘autos’ and my bodymind. Likewise the marks in life outside of this known experience. The ones I make on paper and on my new laptop screen, another place where space has emerged after my previous SSD died last week. I have all this space and I don’t actually know what to do with it.
This is what frightens me. I have spent so long being so many things, so many performances for the outside world. A parent, a partner, mental health patient, academic, woman, autistic. Who actually am I after all these things are removed?
There is a space into which what I am rushes in. What marks will I make?
