Flo Lines

The hidden river of my life.

The garden of my childhood contained the first image of God. Ideas were born from these first interactions; I reach for the ways my memory interlocks with my vision. I see 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; a way of being where life becomes a mystery to hold, one that begins to feel like an invitation rather than a puzzle to solve. 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 really 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. We are only recipients, watching the way a word might visit us, or perhaps we are 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 as humans, we all 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 or 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 met through contemplation; the yoke, the centre, reached for 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 known, instinctual, quiet. Sufjan Stevens wrote it in lyrics; the hidden river of my life. It is also 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 are so often lost somewhere, only heard in moments of quiet; when 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 can provoke. 

 

What does it mean to remember, and remember together, towards the future and into the past? The spiral as it expands outwards. Belief for many has been landlocked, untethered and entrenched. A friend once told me that spirituality is like having your heart broken and I think we are in an age of profound heartbreak. Oliveros once said, offer your experience as your truth. I see the sun come up and remember somewhere it is raining. 

 

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.