I am a poet, graphic artist, psychotherapist and seeker.
Not necessarily in that order. Emily J Gibson is the portal to express all of the above.
In the nineties I was working as a children’s book designer. After five years I left my job to go on a road trip with a girlfriend across America. Many adventures later, I ended up attending a workshop in Oregon, with a group of women, called ‘Into the Mystery’. At its most simple, this was an initiation into meeting myself and at its most profound, it was life changing. I made a deep dive and came out the other side with an awakening to the magnificence of the present moment and a desire to know more about energy. I was 28. I have spent much of the last 29 years following this quest.
On my return, I came across The Artists Way and found my inner poet whilst writing the morning pages (a daily morning ritual to fill three pages of A4 with words). I didn’t know the poems were there until I read back. They were rudimentary but they were definitely bones of poems.
Back in the Uk, publishing was now fully computerised however my new Art Director sent me back in time to attend a metal letterpress course with the designer and typographer Alan Kitchen. His studio in Clerkenwell, was an Aladins cave of delight. Handling individually carved fonts, deepened my appreciation of the aesthetic of typography. I had a daughter in 2000 and in my newfound position of endless nights in, started to create graphic works with the poems.
As a student, in the late eighties, I was alerted to the bullshit of patriarchy and the out of balance impact this system has on ALL human life. Then understanding the impact to all LIFE and to the planet we call home. As I see it, western practice to plunder the Earth as though she is an inert, dead resource is a heinous and unconscionable undertaking of gargantoum proportions. The consequences of which, we are witnessing and living.
Travelling along my life, I continued exploring alternative thought systems and indigenous practices. I retrained as a therapist in my late thirties for three main reasons. One, a passionate interest in what drives us as humans; two, to give something more back; and three (but l was less aware of this at the time) securing a status of legitimacy to where my ‘seekings’ were taking me. (We know what patriarchy does to women who step out of line…)
I am currently involved in an incredible and humbling programme learning and experiencing the Nature Wisdom practices of the Q’ero Indians of Peru. To the Q’ero, like all indigenous wisdom, everything is alive. To illustrate the depth of this lived understanding, they don’t have nouns in their language, only verbs. The practices are about developing our relationship with nature beings. The earth we live on, the cosmos we spin through. They are the energetic living bodies from where we come, they are the living bodies that sustain us.
The poems are a nod to the injustices of ‘this’ world and the deeper wonder and magic of the collective energy of all worlds, both inner and outer.