Nurturing my hopeful monsters

The latest donation to my Saving the Only Life I Can comes courtesy of Matt Wicking, who is the lead singer from the Australian band The General Assembly. I fell heavily heart-first into their music when I saw Matt performing at my first Uncivilisation Festival in 2011. I hadn't yet mustered the courage to contact Matt and ask for his permission to include General Assembly tracks in my creative project but happily he fortuitously and unexpectedly materialised in front of me at this years Uncivilisation (which I was at last month). I excitedly bounded up to Matt and blathered away at him about wanting to use his music for my Saving the Only Life I Can project. I waxed lyrical about how much one of the tracks from The General Assembly's Dark Mountain Music EP had meant to me at the depths of my depression. He generously said an unreserved yes pretty much straight away and then he asked me which track I was talking about ... my mind went blanker than a very blank thing and I couldn't even recall a single lyric ... it was totally mortifying. We hastily agreed that it was probably the track 'Wildwood' I was talking about and left it that. For the next few days of the festival I wracked my brains trying to remember *any* of the lyrics that had purportedly meant so much to me during my darkness last year.

Of course the moment I was back in York and safely out of blathering range of Matt I remembered ... it was the whole gosh-darned EP that had been a life raft for me. Wildwood was indeed thickly rich with lyrics that resonated with me:

"Got me searching for the answers on the forest floor" 

"And now I don't know where I'm going and I don't know where I've been so it's hard to find a place where I fit in" 

"I’m searching for a feeling that might not even exist. It’s like looking for a fog in the middle of a mist. I’ve got a compass in my pocket and a watch on my wrist but I’m lost." 

"And nothing's keeping me from losing all the things I've learnt so I'm lost." 

"Now I don’t want to search no more, for an answer I don’t know no more than I did when I started, don’t want it keeping me awake no more"

You can listen to the track 'Wildwood' here [it's featured on Dark Mountain's 'From the Mourning of the World' LP]:


But every other track on that General Assembly EP had lines in them that seemed to be speaking directly to me too:

"Too nervous to talk, too scared to be silent" 

"We're howling in the mountains, burning bones, firing up flares, calling you home." 

"The story starts at the end of everything."  

"The thought of thinking it just makes you ill. Your mouth is moving but your mind is still." 

"You aim at nothing and give it all you've got" 

"It's what your body won't forget and your mind can't understand. The only way out is through. The only way in is under. If you try to measure it you're bound to lose. If you run from it you won't discover [...]" 

"So hold on, just hold on, hold on, hold on. Yeah hold on, just hold on, hold on."

You can listen to the whole of The General Assembly's 'Dark Mountain Music' EP:


In fact it was the last track on that EP, Hopeful Monsters, that helped to keep me afloat. I remember singing the 'hold on' lines at full voice with hot tears flowing down my cheeks on more than one occasion. It still brings a lump to my throat when I listen to it now.

Listening to the EP (for the hundredth-plus time) again it strikes me that there's something more than the lyrics alone resonating with my bones - There's a beautifully mournful quality to the music and at times Matt's voice sounds like a wounded animal which has taken human form - His voice spoke to the wounded animal in me that wanted to just curl up and howl silently into the forest floor.

Huge thanks to Matt for giving me permission to include these tracks even though I couldn't recall a single lyric or song title when I barrelled up to him at the Uncivilisation festival last month :)

Incidentally you should tarry not, go sally forth and dive deep into Matt's solo project, Huckleberry Mockingbird, which is the name that he sings, blogs and poets under. If you find yourself moved by murmurations, silence, funeral parlours, childhood or imperfection then you will find yourself very much at home on his blog.

Sometimes I Feel So Temporary

This is one of my first ever all digital illustrations - it was inspired by the lyrics of a Rumer song called 'Healer' which is one of the songs on my Saving the Only Life I Can playlist.

 
 So this is the first item donated by me to my Saving the Only Life I Can project. If I was feeling fearless I would write to Rumer and ask her if she could donate the track but for now here is a beautiful live version from YouTube:

 

Don't. Wake. Up.

Laura (aka She Makes War, aka @warriorgrrl) calls her music 'DIY gloom-pop' and, yes, her music does have a serious, weighty, dark and bewitching feel to it but I certainly never feel gloomy when Laura's sirenesque visceral vocals start insistently swirling around my brainspace. Something about the defiant tone in Laura's voice as she sings makes me feel galvanised whenever I listen to this track. On days when I felt adrift and rudderless Laura's voice was an anchor, life boat and safe harbour all in one.

I first heard 'In This Boat' when Laura performed it live at the Hope and Social Garden Party last summer and it  blew me away - by the time she played 'Scared to Capsize' I was fighting back tears behind my sunglasses. I thoroughly recommend you buy her recent album 'Little Battles' which you can download for however much you want on Bandcamp. The artwork is gorgeous though so you might want to splash out and buy a physical copy. And try to see her play live if you get the chance - but Laura makes playing live look so effortless that you might well find yourself thinking you should learn to play the ukulele, buy a loop machine and start a band of your own ... don't say I didn't warn you.

One of my favourite lines from 'In This Boat' is 'in these veins I hunt for poetry' and I couldn't resist writing those words onto my veins - the same veins that a part of me longed to open up earlier this year. Those same veins somehow feel much more embedded in my body these days:

Let's meet at Hope Street

I asked my friend Mark Ivkovic if he would contribute to my Saving the Only Life I Can project by taking a photo of my favourite street sign in York and he certainly did me proud ...

Hope is a word that I've used a lot over the past couple of years but it's a hard word to pin down the meaning of - Charles Snyder defined it as "the sum of the mental willpower and waypower that you have for your goals”. Earlier this year I think I was running low on both willpower and waypower. At that point carrying on the battle against my own mind often became an act of faith with only a small slither of hope that I would ever feel like a halfway normal human being. I wonder now whether I lost hope completely for a short bleak time and that maybe it was running out of hope that signalled the lowest point for me before I started to resurface again. It's hard to know for sure - when I look back at the first three months of this year it's still as bewildering to me as it felt at the time. My hope now is that I stay well and that I help others hold onto hope and seek help a hell of a lot earlier than I did.

You can see more of Mark's talent on his professional photography website: bang | Photography

Mark's photography is inspiring enough but the way he mixes it with words on his blog is something else and this post on his own self-doubt resonates wildly with me and my own cliff edge.

And if you want to visit Hope Street yourself then you can find your own way there with the help of this Google map.

Mark and I are talking about collaborating on some more photos for this project and I'm hoping that some of his photography skills will rub off on me in the process :)

Footnote: In the 'See Also' section of the Wikipedia page there is an entry entitled 'Anything is possible when it means everything' which I love but it turns out that it's a non-existent page and there are only five search results for that phrase in Google, all of which go to dead ends ... how delightfully strange :)

I can tell I'm awake

 

The latest donation to Saving the Only Life I Can is a particularly special one because it has been donated by my cousin, Peter Pollock. I found out that Peter suffers from depression after I told his sister about my depression. It was the same moment that I inadvertently broke the news to my Grandma (I'd naively assumed that she'd already know about it from my Mum). When I've finally mustered the courage to tell friends and family about my depression it's quite surprising how many times those people have responded by telling me that they, or someone close to them who I also know, also has depression. It made me realise how important it is that I carried on telling people - If I stayed silent about my depression then it meant that those around me would almost definitely stay silent about their depression. And a dark secret would be allowed to hide in the centre of my family and in the centre of my life.

As soon as I read Peter's poem on his blog I asked him if he'd be prepared to donate it to my project and he very kindly said yes without a second thought. Thank you cousin - for your poem and for walking alongside me in the darkness.

Crying

I’m awake.
I can tell I’m awake,
I never feel like crying in my sleep.
My eyes are closed.
I’m not holding back tears.
I never try to hold them back, they just never come.
What happened?
Why do I want to cry?
What terrible thing is affecting me this way?
Nothing.
No horrible event,
It’s all just my messed up brain chemistry.
I hate it.
It won’t go away.
…Tomorrow will be the same as every other day.
I’m awake.
I can tell I’m awake -
I never feel like crying in my sleep.

by Peter Pollock

Say something I'll remember the next day

Wilful Missing's 'bright white piano'

DIY by Wilful Missing

I really pleased to announce that the third track to be officially donated to my 'Saving the Only Life I Can' project is DIY by the absurdly humble and beautifully melancholic Wilful Missing. If you aren't as pedantic about punctuation as I am then you can sing along to the lyrics here:




For me this song encapsulates the maddening ambivalence and amnesia of chronic depression - it got to the point where every morning I felt like I awoke at the cliff's edge, peering into the void and I had to spend the rest of the day inching away from the edge, desperately trying to find something, or someone, to treasure, something to celebrate, something to hold onto - any small fragment that would give me hope and help me in my daily remembering of why life itself was worth  holding onto.

"Baby say something,
say something I'll remember
the next day,
but the shadows
conceal us
from hoping."

I'm hugely grateful to Wilful Missing for writing such beautiful music - You can hear more of their tracks on their Bandcamp page. I strongly advise you to go and see them play live if you get the chance ... it's an indescribably magical experience. If you live in York then you are in luck because they're playing at The Stereo on Gillygate next Thursday.

Heading Home with Hope in my Heart

Goodness only knows how A Hawk in the Rain (the combined talents of Cassis Birgit Staudt, Tom Lingard, Simon R. Goff, George Kirkham) managed to collaboratively compose a piece of music that is both heartwrenchingly beautiful and soul-soaringly hopeful but thank goodness they did because this track has comforted and uplifted me on countless occasions since I first heard it about a year ago. It's the second track to be donated to 'Saving the Only Life I Can'.

Home 22-11-10 by SimonRalphGoff

I have always had an uneasy relationship with the word 'home' and last year I was suddenly struck by the shocking realisation that I had no feeling of being at home anywhere in the world, even in my own home. The poet David Whyte often talks about how we are often exiles within our own lives, more of that another time but one of his poems which resonates deeply with me is 'Revelation Must be Terrible' so that's worth reading if you have any 'belonging' issues:

"Being far from home is hard, but you know,
   at least we are exiled together."

On the 24th March, as I reluctantly readied myself to leave the warm embrace of The Maytree, I realised that I felt like I was going home for the first time in more than 30 years. I listened to 'Home' by A Hawk in the Rain as the train carrying me back north pulled out of Kings Cross and I had the broadest smile across my face for every second of the track. Huge thanks to all the members of A Hawk in the Rain who unanimously agreed to donate this track to my Saving the Only Life I Can project. Special thanks go to Simon Goff who I first met in his role as the bassist for Hope and Social and who kindly contacted the other band members to make the request on my behalf.

Hope Still Shines for You

I'm excited to announce the first track to be generously donated to my 'Saving the Only Life I Can' project - I first heard this track by Nicholas Peters last year when my friend Katherine Jewkes (who performs guest vocals on the tracks) tweeted about it. I loved 'Hope Still Shines for You' from the first time I listened to it but in recent months and weeks I found myself listening to it more often - The combination of Nicholas' lyrics and Katherine's ascendant vocalisations both comforted and uplifted me and with every listen I tried to internalise the lyrics to form a protective mantra as I fought my way through the darkness.

"Through your pain and sadness, 
Longing times of gladness, 
Even through your darkness, 
Hope still shines for you."

Hope Still Shines For You by nicholaspeters

(c) Nicholas Peters - 'Hope Still Shines For You' cover art.

Nicholas is the first person I've approached to ask permission to use his track for this creative project and I'm hugely grateful to him for granting that permission so freely. I hope you like the track as much as I do - it has a sort of  mournful yet angelic Monty Pythonesque edge to it and I love it more every time I listen to it. You can read the story behind the track and listen to more of Nicholas' compositions on his website or his SoundCloud page.

Serendipitously, the cover art for 'Hope Still Shines for You' is very similar to one of my own self-portraits:

Saving the only life I can

A few years ago I was introduced to the poetry of Mary Oliver during a creative workshop my friend Sophie Nicholls was running - the poem Sophie shared with us was Wild Geese and I loved it. I looked up more of Mary Oliver's poetry and came across one that stopped me in my tracks: The Journey. The whole poem is beautiful but it was the final two lines that made my bones vibrate and the words in those two lines have stayed very close by ever since:

"[...]
determined to save
the only life you could save."

For more than a year I've been thinking about doing a creative project inspired by those nine words and the time has finally arrived ... It is with great pride and delight that I announce my 'Saving the only life I can' project. Over the next 12 months I'll be gathering together a collection of songs, music, poetry and artwork. Some of it will be pieces that lifted my spirits in recent months and some of it will be things I've created as I tried to find my way out of the darkness. I'll also be creating original work and asking some of the talented folks who inspire me to contribute some new work to the project. On the 24th March 2013 I'll release a beautifully crafted, lovingly curated collection for sale and any money I make will be donated to the Maytree Respite Centre and the Tuke Centre.

I'll release more details as the project takes shape and I'll be announcing my first confirmed contributor very soon.