The Storyless Sea is a graphic novel. Direct download from spirit and laced with memoir – world to hold impossible stories. It also speaks to the environmental and ecological conditions we are facing and explores how our inner world affect how our outer world unfolds. The story is set on a ‘war torn and flooded planet’ it is told from the point of view of Dogfish who has visions/ some kind of channel to ‘dry land’ which no longer exists.
I’ve decided to share the creative process as I go along here and on my blog. I will also be sharing memoir and autobiographical drawing which inform my exoerience and are part of the context in which the Storyless Sea has emerged. Basically, I don’t want to wait until the book is finished to be in communication about the issues I’m exploring or the work I’m creating. These posts will be available to the public as I want the work to be accessible.
There are so many dillemas as a creative person in this day and age and for me getting the work out there is the biggest one. Will my work ever me endorsed and supported by publishing company? As marginal voice I don’t know if that world can accommodate me but there is an immediacy to the issues I am with and a responsibility for me to speak to those who do need my voice which means that I don’t want to wait for some future idea of completion/goal in order to share my work.
There is a need for story to hold our experience at this time. The cultural refusal to integrate our wholeness and relational nature or to create space for grief and death as part of life. There is an epidemic of trauma and fear that is resulting in threat to our ‘ourness’ (a term from Daniel Siegel which includes the individual, our microbials, human community, other than human community, the planet, the cosmos as another level of awareness). I want to be here now with all of this and vision into the future and integrate and release from the past. I want to be in that purpose with you and with our biosphere and all life forms. There is a great and beautiful possibility in this terribly uncomfortable place – we are alive now!
We can all be part of reshaping our possible futures and surrender to a life intelligence that flows within and all around us. I hope my story offers some company and solace and signposts that even a mind grown in the most horrendous conditions has the capacity to change and in doing so change the world.
In times of terror and despair it can be enticing to get lost in visions of horror and how to ‘survive’ I know! What I’m working with is tentative and optimistic hypothesis that we are at a crucial point where our visions and beliefs about what we want and what is possible can come together in a nuanced web of creativity, renewal and liberation into a future that is sustaining, diverse, abundant, curious, loving, joyful and at peace with the realities and limitations of a human experience. Or maybe we’ll do an abrupt evoluntion into energy balls – that could work too!
I’m hopeful also that in sharing some of my wild journies in the under land I will will manage to bring something up that offers nourishment and connection and the greatest gift – space for new perceptions and experiences.
Also it will keep me sane and relieve some creative constipation! It is an expression of my aliveness, my ourness and an ode to love. I’ve been gathering this material alone for years. It’s time for it and me to come into wider relationship and explore that unknown.
with love Alex