A balancing act

How to create the sweet spot of balance in a demanding life.

Shanah Tovah! This newsletter will reach you just as I prepare for the Jewish New Year. It is tradition to eat apples and honey cakes, to put raisins and cinnamon in the challah bread and to wish each other shanah tovah u'metukah, a good and sweet new year.

Unlike the secular New Year however it’s less about fireworks and parties and much more about a time of reflection. It comes just ten days before the serious fasting festival of Yom Kippur and at the end of the month of Elul which is traditionally used as a month for reflection and journaling. The underlying theme of all this is teshuvah which is often translated into English as ‘repentance’ but really has the meaning of ‘returning’. It is a time to see where you have gone a little off track, to return to the path you wish to be on. You might consider relationships, personal characteristics or where you are with your life goals.

For me, now we are almost through a number of challenging and unwanted family health and bereavement situations, I am thinking about how I return to my creativity. What has been learned but also what has pushed me off track from achieving my creative intentions? Where has the space I created in life for art and writing been filled and how can I reclaim it? How do I return, changed of course by the intervening experiences, but with continuing and renewed commitment to the creative life?

One way to interpret teshuvah is as a return to a state of balance. Recently I spent time at a silent retreat and got a useful lesson on this topic.

Each day a yoga class was offered taught by a sprightly, grey haired Rabbi whose slender and bendy body was testament to her long years of practice. She exuded a presence that was calm and wise. Each day when she gave the instructions for assuming tree pose she would offer the option for people to place a hand on the wall to assist their transition to standing on one leg. My mat was the only one in the middle of the room and rather than shuffling past others to a wall I chose to remain where I was. After all I was a regular yogini and well versed in the effort it takes to remain stable.

I focused on creating opposition, gripping muscles tight and pushing one thigh towards the other, engaging my core and gazing with not a little ferocity at the knot on the wooden door that served as my drishti gaze point. Wobbles were staved off with constant adjustments and a reminder to myself that balance is work, a constant awareness of what micro changes are needed, a commitment to complete concentration.

As I reached my arms high and outwards circling my hands to simulate the waving of leaves in the air, I watched Sheila, her fingertips light against the wall assuring those with less yoga practice that it was fine to simply rest their toes on the ground and raise a heel slightly. That too was practicing balance. I noted her kindness in making others feel included by demonstrating the easier position herself despite her expertise.

When the final class came, however, she looked at me and said simply, with a small shrug, “As I get older I find it harder to balance.” She took her position grazing her fingertips against the brick wall, gracefully raised her right foot to her shin and closing her eyes, smiled contentedly.

Our society has made the word ‘balance’ into an active verb, a practice focused on striving and repeatedly reaching for something so far unattainable. It feels familiar to load our lives with myriad obligations, challenges and intentions and summon all our inner resources to keep us from toppling over under the weight of it all. The creative life is no different, especially if it is being undertaken alongside an income producing job or caring commitments.

Approached this way, balance becomes a constant process of falling out of shape, beginning again, falling again. We persevere, driving towards the day when creativity, marketing, education, day jobs, family, leisure, friends, and life administration all stack up perfectly one on the other. We treat the Everydays of our lives as stepping stones to the longed for One Day when we will finally achieve our aim. Worse we do this in the company of others but essentially relying on our own backbone to hold us up.

I learned that there is an alternative. We can accept our limitations, accept that our capacity fluctuates, cease to compare ourselves with others. When we reach out for support we necessarily open up our heart space and feel a sense of connection. Without the need to use our vision to help us hold a fixed position we can raise our eyes from the limited drishti point and view the beauty and community around us.

Abandoning the expectation to try and try again we can make the word ‘balance’ a passive and collaborative state of affairs. It becomes us being balanced by something or someone else. No longer a chimera it becomes an ever available gift from the universe. Less an accounting of how we spend time or how we equal out obligations and desires, balance becomes a somatic experience available to be entered anytime we choose. All we need do is draw a heel to an opposite ankle, brush fingertips against a solid surface and breathe a sigh of relief.

Seen this way balance is not a shimmering mirage of ultimate reward as we stumble through dry desert days but a pool of refreshment we can bathe in whenever we like. It is not a bitter experience of constant failure but a sweet respite. It is not a place we desperately seek out but a place we gratefully return to.

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For you to ponder:

What does balance mean to you?

Where are you being pushed off balance?

What would you like to return to?

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From the studio:

Rosh Hashanah - painted textile.

This is one of the first pieces of Judaica art I ever made, it’s age given away by the date on it! ( We are about to enter the year 5784). Pomegranates are another New Year Symbol as they are just coming into season at this time in the Middle East. Digging this piece out of the archive is a reminder to me of the possibility of return to a variety of options. To textiles, to hand drawing, to keeping a good archive of my work, to graffiti inspired work, to regular studio practice, to Judaica. Also to believing that there is a home waiting for the art I make as an expression of what I love. This piece was bought by an art collector from a work in progress photo shown to him on a phone over dinner. After I had completed it and carefully packaged it up and delivered it across the country he rang to say it was hanging in a room in his house which also contained a Tracey Emin and a Grayson Perry! It is entirely possible that I may need to accept that my exhibiting career peaked at that point 🤣.

Finally… a blessing ( in which this time I seek the support of others to find the right words)

May the words of this poem become yours:

Untitled
by Dawna Markova

I will not die an unlived life,
I will not live in fear
Of falling or catching fire.

I choose to inhabit my days
To allow my living to open me,
To make me less afraid,
more accessible,
To loosen my heart
Until it becomes a wing,
A torch, a promise.

I choose to risk my significance; to live
So that which came to me as seed
Goes to the next as blossom
And that which came to me as blossom
Goes on as fruit.

Shalom,

Helen