Forty Days at the Drawing Desk

A visual meditation of Lenten words

I am writing from a corner of a room in Italy where I can get a phone signal, and allow my laptop to barely speak to the internet where you may read this tomorrow. I have spent a week crushing colourful earths, mixing wild gums and mulling things over. Another week of this approaches, but today is Easter Sunday in Italy, and so we feast and rest together in the new peace of this house, outside Venice. I have also had no alcohol since the New Year, apart from at a funeral, and so I broke my fast today with an inch of wine. No need to go too far…

This week is a between-essays week, so I am collating some of my favourite Lent Words, from a daily practice I had during the 40 days of Lent this year - a first. Each day I would go to my drawing desk and sit until a word jumped into my head about something I was grateful for. Then I would draw something simple to illustrate it. I rarely sit and draw ‘things’, let alone choose a word and consider it all day. So this has been a rewarding process for me, as well as some of you who messaged to say you enjoyed reading them each day in my Notes.

Happy Easter to those who celebrate it. And Good Lent, Ramadan Mubarak, Bright Ostara to my Orthodox, Muslim and Pagan readers. Spring is here, the clocks went forward today, and despite the rainy lagoon weather, the dandelions are shouting repurposed solar energy from the lawn. I am glad of it.

I decided to write the word I intuitively need most each day on scrap paper and then put it on my desk in front of me while I work. I was going to do it for Lent, as an anachronistic practice, re suggestions of @Ruth Gaskovski , to take the place of some less helpful electronic things… But my head already needed this today, and my hand decided to also sketch a mountain. Here it is in case you too need some massive rock vibes.

5: My heart said ‘grit’ so I drew it. Been thinking about the films ‘True Grit’, both the Wayne and Bridges iterations. Remembering the self-pitying teen I was, who in no way could have travelled across a continent on horseback. I send back some love to her, but also, some grit.

After all, wisdom is a pearl, right?

11: Go long without this and I get scurvy of the soul.

Caught early, before anhedonia sets in, is easy enough to treat, for instance, by picking up shells on the beach and running my fingers over their outer ridges and smooth inner surfaces.

Delight is a form of reciprocal love with the real.

25: My first love, according to my (by then exasperated) mum.

There were a couple of decades where I chased Answers. They were beautiful and I wanted them so much! I thought I’d look much cooler if I always had them around.

Turns out they just encouraged me to behave like an arse. I made a right fool of myself, and besides, it was unrequited. It seemed everybody had Answers. We broke up spectacularly when they turned out to be not what they said they were, and often unreliable.

My old flame got in touch, tentatively at first. A gentle query here, a fascinating conundrum there. Now me and Questions are going steady again. They always bring out the best in me. We hang out together, talk late and deep with no expectations from either side. But there’s lots of love and definitely a commitment to staying together.

32: I have a friend who occasionally says, ‘You and X need to meet!’ And he sends an email to us both and we arrange a ‘friend date’. Or he convenes a small online gathering where a few others can instantly feel at home. Or he and his equally wonderful partner host a supper with people I’d want to spend the next week of suppers at table with, to get a chance of finishing the weave of the words and inspiration that the gathering created.

What I lack in bricks and mortar or financial wealth that ‘a woman my age’ should have, I do not miss. Instead, I wrap myself in the endlessly renewed, patched and embroidered shawl of gathering, (which I am sure I did not make myself, but miraculously generates itself on the loom of well-tended relationship…)

There are new threads in the shawl, people I only met recently, but who feel like they will be integral to my elder years. They nestle beside older threads, who are felted into the cloth and could never be pulled out.

Thank you, gatherers, and those gathered.

33: Why is ‘home’ illustrated with a sea beet leaf?

When I have moved home, or have been forced to move home, by eviction, landlordism or events beyond my control, there is one thing which will bed me into my new home better than any other. I go out and meet the plants, especially the edge dwelling and marginal plants, who give so much and inspire so deeply.

These deep rooted, profusely seeding, hardy as hell beings are instructive and often edible. I am thinking of bramble, dandelion, nettle, plantain and my great salty love, sea beet. To feel at home, I eat my surroundings and somehow a great burden is set down, and me and the land can learn a bit about each other, and start to get on.

At first, I simply walk, not foraging, just paying attention. Then, one day, I’ll get a very strong sense that it’s time to gather a few leaves. When I washed up here it was the glossy leaves of sea beet (beta vulgaris) that called to me. Well, it was more like ‘Oi!’

This hyper abundant ancestor of chard and sugar beet is my go-to spinach-like vegetable. Every time I gather a handful, I feel at home. I see it as the gregarious host of a clifftop party, shiny-suited, drink in hand, passing round snacks from a miraculously provisioned kitchen. What a neighbour!

40: Here is a leaf from the sweet chestnut trees which line the road and park in front of my desk. In early winter I cannot walk home without their homely crunch underfoot. In spring their saucy-smelling sprays of flowers challenge my nose so that in autumn I can preserve basketfuls of their delicious nuts.

Chestnut, oak and hazel, (at different times and places that were vital to my life), have been the source of the fruiting bodies of my belonging. Their leaves, the emblem of my companionship with the vast world outside the human sphere.

Before the council comes to flail them, I carefully trim the chestnuts’ epicormic shoots to make charcoal for drawing. For three years now I have watched the squirrels, rooks and magpies at home in these twisting neighbourhood beauties.

Amongst, within, alongside. I give the greatest thanks for the sense of belonging.

If you would like to leave a comment but cannot afford a paid subscription, just reply to this email or message me via Substack and I will comp you six months for free.