The Heart Series is an exploration and dissection of the heart (mine) and what it holds at any given time, after the fallout of the last two years. It changes daily and through intuitive painting, and the flow of ink from the liminal spaces I, as a human being, don’t always have the capacity to face full on. There are frightening and murky realities. As artist and poet I can at least edge ever closer to the truth of things.

The proposal that, if you want something in your life to change (within reasonable context), you have to be the change, to make the change, and then be willing to see where the hell that change will lead, has been an underlined theme for the past few years. This year I swept the notion out of my eyes and into a loose bun and: Made. A. Move. Sloth-like, unsteady, and nonetheless a move sideways off the trail I’d been trundling unmerrily along.

In February, March and April, after an icky protracted winter in a tiny mountain town with a shitty public transport service, I made my move. My friend had suggested that I spend some time at her apartment, just two towns away, while she was in the US. And that’s just what I did, clad head to foot in artistic intention and warmed by the prospect of springtime on the mountain and extra hours of light.

The winter had been brittle. November last year saw me break off a thankfully very brief dalliance with a covert narcissist of the faux spiritual kind, 18 months after leaving the malignant/ overt version that was still stalking and creating havoc (all in the lap of a judge now).

During the pandemic I’d devoured all manner of psychology podcasts and literature about gaslighting, abuse and narcissism, and I learnt all about the varying species of that kind of vermin…unfortunately not before I ignored those many pesky red flags that second time round. But it was brief, I’ll give myself that. (As I don’t wish to detail things here on Lives Creative and I do have a blog on the subject you can contact me via the form on the contact page for a direct link to all those hairy stories, if you’re interested)

Right after all of that narcissistic shizz, I got covid, recovered and flash forward a month i finally arrived for my month and a bit at my friend’s house armed with red wine, a yoga mat, exercise apps, meditation play lists, my inks and finished first draft novels abandoned (let’s say cellared) since 2015.

I needed space and light and relative anonymity to express what was going on with how I was unpacking being single, free, no longer being hunted, able to breathe out after the pandemic, being out of Santa Fiora and how soul-sucking and cloying that town had become after the sloughing of false friends (I think of that like shedding the thick undercoat off the butt of an old stinky dog), and suddenly having the reality of my true solitude hit me way out of the field. I could count 6 good genuine humans in my immediate field of vision, testimony to that circle of intimacy diagram and its set of questions that shines a light on who and where our deep friends, fair weathers or those that ghost out inexplicably fall on the spectrum.

6 is a lot.

I am lucky.

In those new surrounds, writing and painting, I began to feel strong again and genuinely contented. Alone and not lonely. And that feeling not only has lasted, but it’s grown roots and proliferated. Rather than journaling entries each day, I captured how I felt directly in colour through the heart series.

Italy – and how I came to be here – has taught me that simple shifts bring about big change. I might have been waffly once upon a time and even called it fate – but nah….

My simple shift, made on my terms, was wholly intentional action vs overthinking from the comfort of my winter bed. That shift 7 months ago has generated a body of interesting and varied work that has been framed and hung in an exhibition and generated interest and sales.

This shift brought me new friendship, bright new characters, writing, it’s brought me love, discernment, cats, work and opportunity. It’s refilled again and again my hawk heart.

My Heart is a Hawk (a poem I wrote in 2012)

In the dream of olive stands, I walk
with eyes sharpened to stance and stalk,
and suddenly my freed heart is a red-brown hawk
who hovers, plummets, changes tack
she tastes the sweet and salt
even before she preys, the jolt
of a life sent sideways, the guilt, the fault,
the fear the joy – nothing quite so white and black,
and nothing that can be seen from above
no matter how I squint; and learns that love
should always be mistaken for the rough shove
of fright from the touch of nettle on the small of the back

My soul is an orange fox
the daydreamer who leaves her socks
in guest rooms, her head elsewhere. Her watchfulness mocks
the real world though her doubts kite
the sky till the heart who is hawk takes
them and holds them and rakes
the land into neat rows of vine and orchard, and breaks
amongst them as she hangs, falls from her height,
folded, an arrow, taut and angled,
the pull of accipitrine tendon and the crouch of fox, tangled
into one and the same, bleeding and mangled
and ecstatic to see, across the valley, such insurgence of light.

My head is a yellow-haired hound
ears pricked always for the low sound
of disappointment, nose diligent to the ground
when all she wants to do is run,
stretch out over a threshold of a thousand fools
but yokes herself all the same to her own set of rules –
Ah, but to run in the shade that cools
as it cuts a hawk-shaped wedge between hound and sun,
and to dance with the orange fox and her stake
in the claim to the mute mountains and lake
that last night stood jury and heard the end take
root, saw the melding of three clouded beasts into a bright and shining one.