“A wild patience has taken me this far…” Adrienne Rich
At the start of my late and strange life as an artist, I spent two summers beside England’s oldest lido determined to write a mile on scrolls of paper as long as the pool.
In the aftermath of my sudden near-death a decade earlier – when I almost died in minutes – I became fascinated with the idea of slow time. A life in which hurry and rush would be reserved only for accidents and emergencies.
As I sought out stories of extreme effort and patience in service to artistic, social and spiritual causes, my palm-sized private diaries in those obscure and recuperative years became an ongoing commonplace book: Hokusai, Rilke, Jung, Wendell Berry, Agnes Martin – I wrote out by hand what artists and writers across the ages had to say about these values. I read the Paris Review Interviews archive from the 1950s to the present day to learn the working methods of hundreds of playwrights, poets and authors. Said aloud pages and pages of work by writers I most admired in order to tune my ear, before rushing into prose of my own.
In this way I was also dedicating myself – and my unexpected second life – to the practice of effort and patience. What might it do to my days, my imagination, my relationships? If I focussed on process not results?
As I knelt to my five 150-foot long rolls of papers during those first seasons of my self-created midlife apprenticeship, I had by heart this passage from the poet Adrienne Rich as courage and inspiration:
Freedom. It isn’t once, to walk out
under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers
of light, the fields of dark –
freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine
remembering. Putting together, inch by inch
the starry worlds. From all the lost collections.
Five years later, and the Wild Patience Scrolls are completed (all 100,000 words of them), having opened up for me a public life of rich connections unimaginable to the shy student and office worker of my first four decades.
Now, in the next two years as I work in a more solitary way on my book The Cure for Sleep, I will share each week short perspectives from that earlier time, in case it keeps even one other person company in their own creative awakening.
I would be so glad if you joined me in this, by following these posts, using the comments section to add perspectives of your own, and sharing this resource with anyone who you feel might gain strength and inspiration from it.
Regards, Tanya
HI Tanya – I tried to subscribe but am not sure if it went through properly. Can you let me know if not? Thank you!
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Yes, your subscription has worked. Thank you so much for your ongoing interest and support, Joanna. T
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PS – thank you ever so much for doing this!
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I’m curious to read The Cure for Sleep; your story of near death and a second round really resonates. Thank you for your inspiring posts. 🌿
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Thank you. It’s still two years til publication, which is why it felt so important to use the Wild Patience Diaries and other projects like Birds of Firle to keep having the direct conversations with others that brought me to this writing life in the first place. My private measure of success for the book – separate to what the publishing house needs – is that it brings good new people into my life. Having a book in the world is a powerful way of reaching people, but not the only one – these type of exchanges are of equal value to me. So thank you for being in touch.
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I find you absolutely inspirational. At the age of 58 I am just starting out on my writing journey after identifying myself as a visual artist for most of my adult life. I have always written but almost secretly. Thank you for your work which reaches out.
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What a lovely message to see before turning off for the evening. Sincere thanks, Rosalind. If sharing weekly extracts from my journey of last five years is of use to you and just a few others, that’s more than enough motivation for me to keep going. In turn, I will look out for your words as you begin to share them.
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[…] The Wild Patience Diaries are once-weekly creative practice posts that draw on learnings from my late and strange writing journey of the last five years – shared in the hope of keeping others company in theirs. I would be so glad if you became a follower and shared a link to this resource with others you know who are at an early or otherwise tender stage in their artistic awakening. […]
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[…] The Wild Patience Diaries are once-weekly creative practice posts that draw on learnings from my late and strange writing journey of the last five years – shared in the hope of keeping others company in theirs. I would be so glad if you subscribe or share this resource with others you know who are at an early (or otherwise tender) stage in their artistic awakening. Followers receive each new post as an email. […]
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[…] 1: An Invitation […]
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[…] The Wild Patience Diaries are creative practice posts (occasional in this time of Coronavirus; once-weekly again thereafter) that draw on learnings from my late and strange writing journey of the last five years: shared for free in the hope of keeping others company in theirs. I would be so glad if you subscribe or share this resource with others you know who are at an early (or otherwise tender) stage in their artistic awakening. Followers receive each new post as an email. […]
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