k’s big birthday gratitude project 2

Some of you will have already come across a version of this post or an extract of its content … but there are at least two immediate reasons to repeat myself!

The first reason for being especially grateful is that the Godspace blog has been central to my growing confidence as a writer and thus my growth as a creative since 2014. I attribute Canadian poet Gillian Wallace with the dubious honour of giving me the final push to begin the first incarnation of my shotattenpaces.blogpost.co.uk blog. In 2012 she picked up on my renewed confidence with a camera in hand, a deepening sense of feeling at home in expressions of contemplative spirituality, and coupled it with the physical ability to take a maximum of ten paces from car or front door. The widening opportunity to write for somebody else’s blog, came through a synchronous combination from a link to Godspace from Abbey of the Arts and a personal contact to the amazing Godspace creator Christine Sine, from one of my wise women elder figures, Revd Anne Townsend, who was a contributor to Godspace at the time. So to celebrate Godspace in conjunction with noting their role in my years of creative recovery, feels absolutely perfect.

The second reason to be re-state my gratitude is that what was a potential dis-abling experience on a Creative Response multi-art form, multi-response project became a life-enhancing opportunity that has stretched way beyond the original scope of the project which was ‘confined’ to May to July 2021 so that I have now taken the plunge and begun my own YouTube channel.

So a month after I should have shared… here is a post I wrote for Godspace as part of their celebration of Earth Day 2022, which was published on April 21st:

Between April and August 2021 Creative Response Arts was working with performance poet Justin Coe and the Space2Grow community garden project from Farnham, Surrey to make a site-specific arts installation and to publish a book of written responses to the garden, its users, and volunteers. As part of the writing group, I was hoping to spend several long summer days in the Space2Grow acre, by the pond, maybe helping pick fruit or to hoe a row of veg, in between working at various writing exercises with a small-yet-wonderful group of other writers (who had never occupied the same physical space and time together). Sadly, it became apparent that the Space2Grow garden wasn’t yet fully wheelchair accessible and so I would be unable to join the group on these Garden days, getting to know the space to which we were to respond. Instead, I decided to shift my focus slightly and base my own work on what I could experience from my beloved Mum’s ‘greenhouse garden.’ What emerged was a sequence of thirty poems entitled ‘growing space.’ Some of these finally found their way into the group anthology ‘Where Seeds Are Planted Poems Grow’. This book was launched during the Farnham Literary festival in early March, and since I was unable to be physically at the launch, I made several (really basic) short films, each no longer than three minutes, of me reading a selection of my poems included in the anthology.

As part of the celebrations and demonstrations around Earth Day/Earth Hour, I offer a couple of these short films to the Godspace community. For me, each word, photo and painting that together constitutes my ‘growing space’ sequence, is a miracle of grace: a dis-abled, isolating moment of potential exclusion was transformed into an opportunity for learning, expansion and community. It feels like my own personal parable of just one instance where beauty has emerged from ashes – again – to surprise and stagger me into remembering the Presence of the One who continues to Grow is beside me throughout …

growing space xviii

come into the garden of colour

dig down through the undercroft of umber

be bedappled below sunfiltered lime

interweave between smoked rounds of plum

and orange-zest edged in iridescent pink

breathe in lungfuls of rose for rest, then,

wander through the meadow of waving

white daisies turned pointillist painting

by cornflower, nigella and canterburybell blues

highlights of red campion, mauve borage

shadows of dusky lavender leaning into indigo

sit amongst the sunflowering solarseekers

let your face reflect buttercup gold

warm yourself beside the spiced flames

of marigold, nasturtium and yarrow

wade through waters become skywindows

duck-egg-shell wash under the cream-centred

lilies as they float, fill, tip, empty, float, fill, tip,

empty their rainbowed balm over your feet

seek your palette here where shades 

display all their hues, shuffling in intensity

as the light falls, conjuring new dynamics

and harmonics at the moon’s rise

you who know your colour, come, rejoice,

you who can only feel alien in your skin

come, explore, and let the comfort 

of colour find you, here, where

each tone has its tune, come,

bring your voice to add its riches

the garden of colour welcomes allcomers

growing space vi

to become human again

make your own ritual:

before you dance, 

sit quiet, 

breathe 

into this place,

receive

its’ breath into you;

be your own education:

hear the ant scurrying concrete,

watch the blackbird scuffing soil,

follow the petal’s unfurling 

attune to the arc of the sun;

find your own purpose:

soak yourself in wind and rain,

saturate yourself in the orange 

warmth of peeling brick,

shelter yourself in the shivering blue

shadows under eaves,

let the eyes of your heart 

sink deep into scent,

inward and outward be opened,

listen to your own knowledge take deep root,

awake to the pulsations of connecting

and permit them to propel you

to where you are most needed;

accept your own responsibility:

bend your head and allow

this benediction of green

to flow over you,

blow through you, and then,

only then, find your means 

to pass on such blessing

to another.

Editor’s Note: If you’d like to see more of our author Kate Kennington Steer’s poetry read, you can check out her YouTube channel here!