I am limited

Last week it was my great honour to have another ‘monk in the world’ post published on the Abbey of the Arts Blog. Here is that post:

A few months ago I wrote these words in response to a series of photographs (some of which are pictured here) I made in collaboration with the Kinship Photography Collective, for their project ‘between bodies’:

information remains

teasingly just out of reach

behind the darkest 

bottle-green blur of a hedge

or perhaps a single leaf,

here where size is distorted

and volume compacted.

there are limits to this seeing.

I am limited.

so I am compelled to ask

how meaning might be made

from such seemingly 

empty space.

whether I would settle for

even partial revelation

of these enshadowed places,

this mystery

of endarkenment

I apparently need to welcome

if I am to see the light.

for now the gaps and the blanks

have become rest stops,

those breath-gathering places, 

the required pause and hiatus …

Writing the lines ‘there are limits to this seeing/I am limited’ was revolutionary for me.  As was the idea of waiting, open to the moment, attentive to what might want to be expressed through me, to receive images that might defy even my own understanding.  Let’s be honest, images which most people would delete.  

Instead my Kinship practice group encouraged me to make my limitations visible, something I don’t recall ever intentionally doing before.  Normally I end up using long telephoto lenses, so I can crop a picture later in order to get nearer my subject.  This sleight of hand is necessary because I do not have legs that will carry me more than a few steps, and most terrain where I want to go is not wheelchair friendly.

Even though I call myself a contemplative photographer I realised how influenced I remain by the learned mores of the commercial photography we see around us from every screen and billboard. This teaches me to remove myself from the picture.  After all, much of being disabled, or chronically ill, or maybe just being downright poor, isn’t glamorous or photogenic or newsworthy.  We have made a society which turns away from the homeless woman at the end of our home street, whereas to watch survivors of war or famine flee to distant refugee camps is palatable, at least for a short time.  Yet, which picture do I pray over?  Which picture stirs me to action, to enter the struggle for systemic equality where we all might flourish?  Which picture persuades me to save my planet in every way I can – today, right here, right now?

I am limited – by energy, by time, by financial hardship, by pain, by immobility.  I often find I cannot reach far enough to see ‘round’ the pillar or post or person in front of me.  So why do I pretend otherwise?  Why do I too often give up, frustrated?  Isn’t the work of acceptance and surrender, which is at the core of contemplative spirituality, meant to include the way I make my art as well?  Sometimes the person will move and the view opens up.  But often it does not.  And seeing from a wheelchair often dictates that one sees from a limited plane, particularly when it hurts to point a camera up to a too bright sky or to bend down to allow the perfume of the lilies to imbue the lens.  

There is just no point me wasting my precious energy longing to be a mountain-top landscape photographer!   Let that be the work of others.  So, what is my work?   I tell my soul: find a way to show that the possi bilities of the things which limit you are endless.  They are no bar to creating, but rather the frame that others might need to see if they are to see the world through another’s eyes.  They may not be beautiful or easy to see. It may require longer looking. But there is a gleam here, a shape there, a colour tone which surprises and a blank which puzzles.  All are routes into and through the darkness; all are dark joys, dark hopes.

And then I tell my soul, now look for those whose ways of seeing and creating might join with yours.  Look for the collaborators and curators and co-creationists.  And when you find them (and you will), ask them: will you let your limits meet mine for a while and shall we watch our edges dance and see what what might be birthed in their play?