A quick update on The Total Artist... and a bit of poetry

Here's a poem or two for you!

Hello friends,

I hope you enjoyed that little rhyme in the subheading as much as I did. :-)

Many apologies for the gap in our regularly scheduled programming with The Total Artist.

Wondering where I’ve been?

Over the last month, I’m afraid life has gotten the better of me. Both my daughter and I came down with what the nurse at my GP described as a textbook case of glandular fever (aka mononucleosis), and it has hit me hard.

This illness piled on top of what I can only think to describe as an extended life-quake: one of those periods of time where your entire life turns upside down and nothing escapes unscathed.

So suffice it to say, I have been alternating between frantically trying to keep up with the demands of everyday life and hiding under a blanket.

I kept thinking ‘tomorrow will be the day I can get Total Artist going again!’ But then comes another tomorrow, and another, and another, and here we are a month later.

So… what now?

I’m optimistic that things are getting a bit more stabilised, so I think it’s safe to say this will be restarting and more inspiration will be coming to our inbox soon!

I have a few bits I prepared for last month but was not able to send out, so I’ll pop those along first to tie up the loose ends. And then we’ll just jump in wherever we are and keep discovering what these creative experiments uncover.

(I’m trying to use this as an opportunity to take my own advice - that the root of a thriving creative practice is returning to it again and again, each time we get derailed.)

In the meantime…

Here’s ‘Two Poems About Motherhood’. I filmed both of these in my parents’ home in Colorado, using things my mother had lovingly saved from my own childhood.

(I’ve included the text below as well!)

TWO POEMS ABOUT MOTHERHOOD

I. BICYCLE SEAT

Your father shows me
A toddler seat
For his bicycle
And my breath stops

How can I send you both
Out into the world
Riding at speed
On these tiny scraps of metal
Among the menacing hordes
Of automotive monsters?

I joke that I would like 
To wrap the two of you
In bubble wrap
But am I joking really?

The thing is
Wrapping someone 
In bubble wrap
Is not such a great idea

When I wake in the early hours
Fresh from strange dreams
Of pandemics and post-structuralism
I have a terrifying image
Of you encased tightly in plastic
Slowly suffocating under the layers
Of insulation that I have tenderly
Wound around you to keep you safe

It is something people say
All the time, ‘I want to wrap
You up in bubble wrap’
It means I love you
I thought I was just doing
What mothers do

I never dreamed that
I was more dangerous
Than the things
I fear

So instead I offer to wrap you
In a silky-soft down comforter
Hoping you don’t have
Your father’s allergy to feathers

But I suppose
You would rather
Take your chances 
On the toddler seat

II. MISSING MOTHERS

Any student of fairytales will tell you
Almost nothing is as essential as
A missing mother.

The journeys and adventures belong
To the orphaned and abandoned;
Not to those tucked safely in bed,
Left with a warm kiss on their brow.

For the longest time I thought
This must be a plot imperative.
Of course there must be an absence
To trigger the journey. And critically,
No parents to stand in adventure’s way.

As I grew older, I began to suspect that
This was instead a form of misogyny
The women are deleted, made invisible
Killed by the hands of an unseen author,
That of our own collective unconscious,
Erasing the women who create and raise us

(Can you imagine the self-proclaimed stars of
The Hero’s Journey putting up with the same?)

But now that I am a mother, reading stories
To my own daughter, I have encountered this as
A more complex puzzle. If women are the ones
Originating and perpetuating these fairytales
Why do we leave ourselves out of them…?
I know now that it is because we are desperate –

(Not thinking that we don’t matter,
But knowing how much we do – )

– Desperate to believe
That our children will survive without us
And to give them the tools and imagination to do it.
Even though we may not appear in the narrative
It is our voices that carry the stories forward
Through generation after generation, bedtime
After bedtime, with a love so profound it can only
Be made clear by enacting its own absence.

Thanks for hanging in there with me - wishing you all the best on your own creative adventures!

For now,

Alli