大象传媒

A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Harry Baker

Good morning.

This month I am about to go on tour. I'm playing about 35 different dates all over the country and I am so excited to share my new poems with people. As a performance poet a lot of what I write is with an aim to share it out loud, so it often feels like when I am on stage it is these words finally getting to thrive in the environment they were made for. There鈥檚 a lot of nervous energy around ticket sales but mostly I cannot wait. It鈥檚 my favourite thing to do.

Which is why it felt conflicting when I finished my last tour that I knew what I needed to do was exactly the opposite. After gigs disappeared during Covid and I began to fear they would never come back, it had been especially cathartic to feel like we had come through the other side, and very tempting to want to keep going forever, in case it got taken away again. Yet despite this, or indeed because of this, I knew what I needed to do most was to take some time out from performing. To allow myself to write for the sheer fun of it again. To have dinner with friends. To finally get involved in the five-a-side football WhatsApp group I鈥檝e been lurking in for five months. To not just make a living but to make a life, or, as Robert Henri puts it, to be in a wonderful state that makes art inevitable.

As counter-intuitive as this was, it has led to me writing more in the last six months than ever before. It means the admin behind the scenes feels worth it because I have something that I want to say. It means I am looking forward to the friends I am staying on the way as much as the gigs themselves. It means that when this tour is done, I will almost definitely be taking another break until I feel ready to go again on my own terms.

Dear God, thank you for connection. Thank you that whether we are in a group of 2 or 2000 we do not exist in isolation. Thank you for this wonderful world we find ourselves in, and I pray you would enable us to take some time today to appreciate it. To know that whatever it is we decide to do or not to is a choice we are empowered to make, and to help us make the right one.

Amen.