Well there now, the new term has started. I got my grades for last term's modules on Tuesday evening, they feel fair to generous and put me in a mid bracket. The need was only to pass and i was worried that i wasn't good enough to have passed and so a pass feels nice, but then there's disappointment in myself that i do better, no question in me about my grades, they were as good as i deserved, but can i be better ? is this where i rest ? or is there another ounce or so that i can give ?
On Thursday we had tutorials with our main subject teachers and they were helpful and positive. I will continue to explore printmaking and trying to make "pictures" out of stories. In one of my last term's tutorials my teacher questioned me wanting to back off from my own story. I wanted then to see if i could make work that was not related to me, to take more universal themes and give them my mark but it seems that the way i give them my mark is to take them inside of myself and then re-release them as i have found them within me. 
I failed to get to grips with the RIPU project until almost too late. Thankfully just in time i broke in, breaking in has shown me new ways to enquire but i was not quite forward enough to really make the most of this module. It has made me aware that i need to dig deeper, to read other people's thoughts and go further with my own. 
Last term i gave myself a hard task, i set out to explore a story i was only slightly familiar with, from a culture that was not mine, and which i had only indirect experience and no real physical reference points. I think i took on too much. Maybe i needed to take on too much. But it meant that i was unable to go as deeply into the story as i would have liked and that researching the story distracted me from other research and meant that the MA modules barely linked. 
This term i'm exploring for my ASU 2 unit the stations of the cross, christ's journey to his crucifixion. Not a cheery subject but it calls to me so i'm going with it. I begin with an easier in because christianity and the Church of England church are part of my formative years. I have no religion now, i am perhaps polytheistic, interested in religion but not committed to one, i err most towards nature as my source, but a light christianity forms the bedrock of my being. And the bible as a storybook is no worse than any other book of stories as an aid to understanding. 
I am not sure how i will move with the Stations. At the moment i am looking at artists, poets and film makers for inspiration, taking in the journey, the passage, that Jesus took to his death on different levels, considering his life as it is given to us by the saints who wrote the gospels, thinking about those who according to those gospels shared his life and death. Wondering about telling the stations not from his perspective but from those whose lives he touched. I trust my creative process to take me where i need to go. 
That leads me to my SNU project which is coming from my own story, my memories, my being. I was drawn to do this because i found some old photos of Jon on a memory stick over the christmas holidays. It made me realise that i needed to allow myself to bear witness to the life i had with him, in part because there is no one for me to share witness with him, our life together was mostly just him and i. I have buckets of memories but no-one to turn to and say "do you remember ?" and cannot bring him back to life in that way. I cannot bring him back to life physically but this is how we bring our dead back to life when we have need of them. 
When Jon died my counsellor said glibly that my grief would be a complicated grief. She spoke truly. My relationship with Jon was both light and dark and to deny either would diminish the whole. So i have to take in the good with the bad, and the bad with the good, they are front and back, left, right, night, day, up, down, a pairing. Finding balance between the pair creates a tension that i must meet or else lose the truth.  
My feeling is that my SNU project and my ASU 2 project will have meeting places but it will only be by travelling their paths that i will find them. Already i have widened the scope of the SNU to a broader theme that is memory and remembering tho i think this theme will dilate and contract as the pupil of an eye dilates and contracts, to meet circumstance, both past and ongoing. Widening the scope changes the theme but maybe that is actually the need i am meeting. Placing my relationship with Jon within the context of my whole life. Giving him, giving us, our being together, the space, the worth, that he, that we, that i, that he and i together, that i think we merit. His family have been absolute in their condescension, i am sure i am written out or cast as worthless or worse within their narrative. I guess that hurts. No, i don't guess, i know. It hurts. Maybe this project is also part of healing that hurt.  
I linger too long on a delicate subject. Of course being blanked, excluded or cut is painful. It may be that it is in felt experience that my SNU and ASU meet. Feelings run clean through time. Feelings may be the path that connects one story to another. 

And so to begin again after hand-in. In education terms and deadlines become the points of focus. I have missed, i think, having very definite points of focus. Self-driven work is another kind of hard, easier in some ways because the pace is driven by oneself, but harder because without the clock ticking outside of oneself the drive forward can lose momentum. It makes for different work. The struggle at uni is to keep up with the pace whilst simultaneously owning the path taken and not squandering internal resources. 
The last term's hand in was on election day. I wasn't sure if i was wired because of the election or the hand in but either which way it has taken me some days to come down. I did not want the Conservatives to win this election so my moods have passed through some changes, from numb to denial to anger to resignation. I am not sure where i am this morning it's quite early so i guess i'll have to wait and see. 
My next term's source story is the stations of the cross, christ's journey to crucifixion, and i think to rising again. Are there comparisons to be made between Corbyn's modern day crucifixion by most of the press and the old Blairite-Labour people who resented his leadership and his call to socialism as the way forward ? Perhaps it does bear comparison in so much as great stories, stories that are told over and over become guiding myths, with characters that become icons. At present Corbyn is just a man who came to be a leader. But there are similarities between the two stories. The crowds that gathered, the ask that all should be treated kindly, the calling out of those whose worship falls to money & false idols, and now the pillorying of the man and those closest to him. I will be interested to see how he rises again. I am sure that he will. 
Politics and art and religion, what a combination, i guess it's always been this way. They stand as bedrock to humanity. Politics is body, if we are not fed & sheltered our bodies cannot thrive, if this is denied us the body dies. Art is soul, life blood poured onto page, take page as any form of art, it is expression, how soul takes form. And religion, religion can be corrupt, religion can be debased, defiled, made unworthy, but religion as faith is not religion that has made it's bed in corporeal pleasure. Let me say that religion is spirit but the spirit can rise only so far as the body will allow.
Before the election the Archbishop, Justin Welby, and Chief Rabbi Mirfiz firmly placed their faiths in the hands of the Conservative leaders. There is no distance now between these men and those they gave their colours to. Welby is tweeting empty prayers for the poor. His prayers are only for himself, a throwaway token that carries his hope that he would still like to be seen as worthy and good. 
Oh how they wish to seen as kind. Oh how we wish to be seen as kind but the election result has also brought me up sharply against my own worst nature. I want a government who cares for those who are struggling so i don't have to. Honestly, that's my truth. I am not a brilliant or good person. It will be interesting negotiating Christ's path from birth to death and beyond this term as someone who is decidedly not a saint or martyr and has no inclination to be either. I have no doubt this is going to bring me up against myself and teach me some hard truths. 
The Bible is the holy story i was brought up on. I was Church of England as a child, my mum took us to church and later i sang in the village church choir. I can remember being confirmed. I love to visit churches now and i would say that christianity is a lingering scent but i have no religion as such. I take a little of any that ring true and walk away from doctrine because i'm uncomfortable with tethering, it doesn't suit me. However, as with the Ramayana which i have just spent three months researching, drawing it in to my body and then letting it out again as i have understood it, i am looking forward to immersing myself in Christ's story. It's more familiar, i know parts so the path may feel more familiar, but a path trod over and over again changes all the time. 
At the beginning of my MA we were taken on a trip and asked to think about psycho-geography which is a coined phrase for how we know a place, not just physically but emotionally too. I suppose that my meeting with these great stories, the birth of christianity and the Ramayana is a similar kind of knowing. By immersing myself in the storyline i begin to know my way, i begin to map the story, knowing it as i might know landscape. 
With this second term's story i have begun by thinking about the birth of Christ. It is good timing as we are coming up to christmas tho' i think Father Christmas is the more cherished god at this time of the year. Still if anyone is interested i have scribbled a Madonna & Child as part of my thinking and posted it on my Instagram rebeccaclifford8379. I think most people will only see scribble but most of my ideas begin with a scribble.