The garden of my childhood contains the first image of God. Ideas were born from these first interactions; I can reach for the ways my memory interlocks with my vision. I think of the saplings that I spent an afternoon painting as a child, and think of those unbeknown rituals we invent so naturally and easily when we are young and fresh to the world. In the time before, when the mind had gained less territory. 

 

Around three years ago, I began to really think about instinct. This came with the beginning of an internal conversation about trust, a dialogue I have continued with patiently. My unknowing is key; life becomes a more pleasant mystery to hold and leave unsolved, one that begins to feel like an invitation. The shapes my being can make in the invitation to lose control; spiralling, unfurling, unravelling across the long days of my life. 

 

A creative practice of any kind must first be an act of faith. I don't think I would have ever thought this until I started to observe the arrival of ideas; their mystery, their temporal nature. Always in flight, nearly landing. An idea might be a clue to something else. And we are only recipients, watching the way a word might visit us, or perhaps we wait at the waterside, waiting for something to bite. The finger in the fish's mouth. Ideas have their own lifetimes, stories and textures.

 

I write these words because I think most people have a tendency to forget that creative expression, and the relationships we hold to it, are central parts of acting on faith - of our instinct for religiosity. They are the ways we make worlds. The forgetting of this instinct casts a long shadow on modern life, on our minds, places and relationships. What we fail to repress and sublimate visits us nonetheless, visiting us in our dreams - asking for attention, asking for belief.

 

As a songwriter, the words that visit me often feel mysterious, layered, they reveal to me as much as they compel me towards the source. Sometimes there are images that feel especially powerful. I became obsessed with the image of a rain cloud floating alone in my living room, drenching the furniture. I wondered how this image might contain its own story, whilst also being an embodied memory of a feeling. I wondered what was drenching me, and I wanted to find out. 

 

This curiosity, and deepening interiority, is contemplation; the yoke, the centre, found in all mystical traditions. It is also the deeper resonance found in a creative practice when you begin to receive its vitality. It is the relationship we must make with the sides of us that are less knowable, instinctual, quiet. Sufjan Stevens wrote it in lyrics; the hidden river of my life. It is the language of terra, our earthliness. The inner solitude we find is the way we build faith in the external world. The truth of our physicality - I believe it is a promise too. 

 

I return to instinct as a way of knowing, with its symbols and mysteries, in a time of great disconnect. The present remains an irrefutable story of longing, and the anecdotes of grief have been lost somewhere, to be found at the riverside, or in moments of quiet where the world might speak. Now exists a time with less trust, of machinic pressures and poor memory. As I write these words I sit with the hard and bitter feelings this understanding evokes. 

 

What does it mean to remember, and remember together, to the future and into the past. The spiral as it expands outwards. This current shape is landlocked, untethered, and on the island we say little (yet there are so many things to say). Elsewhere, I see the sun come up and remember somewhere it is raining. Culture holds the relationship of remembering, of a common language. A friend once told me that spirituality is like having your heart broken and I think we are in an age of profound heartbreak. 

 

I write lyrics to move through things I do not understand, but I feel. It is a form of navigation. It grows a sense of spaciousness within me. I capture images that contain memory, and hold a way of seeing. Increasingly I feel a sense of longing, a feeling which arrives as a companion to the faith that grows inside of me. I see myself painting trees as a child near the long, loud motorway. These stories are sacred to me, and faith must be a vessel, it holds my feelings, it spills me out into the world.