With all its Fear and Grace is an ongoing reflection upon my childhood and the search to find a home within myself. It shows my emotional progression from the child’s absorbed perspective to the contemplations of an adult.
Memories of ease and certainty are rooted within the landscape of my childhood’s endless summers. Revisiting this familiar landscape, I allowed myself to play, to be immersed, to surrender. When I found the fields dried up the next summer I started to collect the flowers and to study them – objects of strength and tenderness. Both perspectives reflect my search for universal trust within myself. I’m hoping to find a certainty to belong and the empowerment to be.
From ‘The Grown-Up’ by Rainer Maria Rilke
All this stood upon her and was the world
and stood upon her with all its fear and grace as trees stand,
growing straight up, imageless yet wholly image…
As she endured it all: bore up under
the flying, the fleeting, the distant,
the inconceivably vast, the still to learn…
Till in the midst of play,
transfiguring and preparing for the future,
the first white veil descended, gliding softly over her opened face,
almost opaque there, never to be lifted off again,
and somehow giving to all her questions just one answer:
In you, who were a child once – in you.