Waiting without expectation

spoons

This morning at Pilates, two women were waiting for the class to start. Both dressed in soft pink. Both friendly and welcoming. I said, "I would like to make a sculpture of you. Soft and kind." They asked what that would look like. I said they probably wouldn’t even recognise themselves. Maybe only the pink.

That same morning, I had already had a kind of brainwave: that I want to express my softness — my increased, or rather acknowledged softness — through pink. I thought of the pink blossoms I once saw during a winter in The Hague, when I was nineteen, newly living on my own. So wondrous. Transparent. With shadow. With deep tones of moss green and dark red. And of course those grey-brown branches. From those colours, I once made a skirt, using screen printing. It is still hanging there, waiting.

When I came home, my husband said how much he enjoyed now being part of a women’s business network. We agreed to welcome the pink ladies at the gallery in Warmond. That turned out to be fortunate, because the timing had not been planned well. Luckily, I was able to find the key and let us in. No one had to wait. We all arrived at the same time.

It became clear to me that the concept of waiting has been with me for a very long time. I read Siddhartha in 1988. I borrowed it from someone who later moved in with me. It was about being still, about waiting. Perhaps the book is a bit too religiously tinged, but that waiting — that stillness — has been on my path for quite some time.

I had to think of a poem I once had to memorise. My father tried to help me. I couldn’t do it. I only remember the final line: Only a little goat bleated and a cuckoo called. I was never able to recite that poem from memory. Never.

Later, I experienced the same hesitation, a blackout, when I played the lead role in The Threepenny Opera. The song stopped. Silence. It began again. I sang, I stopped. The orchestra stopped. Everyone waited. In tension. I collapsed. Completely. I wanted so badly to live up to the expectations. But it was precisely those expectations that blocked me.

I couldn’t finish anything. No exact studies. No clear route. I gave myself a generous failing grade. Far below standard. That is how it felt.

And today, the waiting suddenly surfaced again. As if it had been lying there, ready, for some time. It feels like my logical response to the keys, and to a world that wants to be effective, efficient, to the point, successful, active, and perfect. Even the keys I make — which open so many worlds — deal with makeability, and sometimes with unmakeability. But they also carry time within them. Past, future, and waiting. My work is allowed to exist without expectation.

That became very concrete when I left the gallery and saw that the car was still there. My husband was still around somewhere, training. I waited in the bright winter sun. People with and without dogs passed by. I recorded a short video of the winter landscape, nature was waiting to develop. Just after fourteen seconds, I pressed stop, when someone suddenly shouted loudly: WAIT! I had stopped just a little too early. I hadn’t waited quite long enough.

That shout was a command. Directed at a dog. Like the one you give at a pedestrian crossing. Actively imposed. But the waiting I am referring to cannot be enforced.

I went to the thrift shop lateron and saw all kinds of objects lying there, waiting.

spoons waiting to stir

I thought of a poem by Annie M.G. Schmidt. About teaspoons that want to stir. They, too, had to wait.

In the shop I noticed that I was now consciously leaving things behind. Allowing them to wait for better customers. People who could do more with them, make them contribute and be useful. Who might be happier with them than I would be?

When I buy them, some of the objects I eventually use in assemblages, I first live with at home for a while. A vase. A small plate. And when the time is right — I don’t know why — it shifts to the studio. Sometimes it happens the other way around. I find toys in the studio that have suddenly become suitable for my granddaughter.

Difficult to explain how everything is connected to everything.

waiting · without expectation · time · softness · making · objects · everyday life