It's going to be hard not to write in anger today. My focus is in part on the work I am putting up for the exhibition at Cley in a couple of weeks, dyeing threads and tying them around sticks to spell out l.o.v.e in braille. 
But all the time I am thinking about the people who burned to death in the Grenfell fire, and those who saw and heard them burn to death, and those who are intimately connected, friends, family .. and so on out .. it's too shocking to take in, too horrible to admit. 
And it's hard to know what to say .. it's a serious wake up call. The suffering all across the world is disregarded by most governments it seems in their pursuit of wealth and status and power. Greed and pride and vanity are guests of honour. And those who are in government to serve the people of a country more often seem to serve those who fund them, the rich donors hold sway and if there is nothing left for the poor because the rich have had it all, so be it. Well, that is not ok, surely that is not ok. 
So how do I fit my work around a darkness that needs to be felt. When the sun shines, and babies are laughing, and flowers are in bloom, and so on, it is easy to love, such grace lends itself to love, but how can love keep going when the world is ugly. 
I was thinking before I wrote this blog that I would post images of notes I've made for the piece of work I'm making but it all feels so trite and irrelevant. Britain has a prime minister who is planning to begin Brexit negotiations tomorrow as if life just carries on and it does, but also it doesn't. Even writing a blog that most likely only one or two of my close friends will read feels somehow disrespectful. 
So that is love maybe .. sometimes there is no love .. it will come back, it does come back .. but sometimes there's a pause, a stop, when love draws in, holds children a little closer, calls for a quiet attention, a softening inside to cope with the hardness of that which is outside, maybe sometimes love needs meeting like a white flag on a bloody battlefield, needs surrender, truce and grace, and give and understanding. 
I will come back to my notes tomorrow or the next day or the day after, I had thought I would be more determined but I was wrong. I am glad I was wrong, I don't want to be tough in the face of suffering, it hurts to feel, but it's an unfeeling world that accepts and depends on the suffering of others for the pleasure of the self. 
There is a need for change, I think, and maybe opening up to feelings, our own and those of other people and beings, is a way that change might happen. Excuse me for thinking out loud.