Forgiving hands
I’ve recently reached one year at DARP, one year since I left London and took on the task of reconfiguring my brain with the slowness of seclusion. Reading back some of the journal I was keeping during the first few months of this newness was difficult in parts; reading and absorbing the anguish in my voice, observing myself observing myself as daily practice. I’m shameless of him, also without pride. I’ve no longer the need to stretch towards these zones, which leave gaps, give me a comedown. Chopping off –pruning– extreme emotions is helping me nurture a stronger, bushier neutral zone. Instead I notice my lips are dry and need some attention; I salve them and take a quick screen break.
There are a huge amount of small changes I have been trying to implement, the sum of which can appear to others as one big one. So minute and incremental, they stack like layers of bible paper / rotting leaves / misspent words. It’s a game, putting down boundaries, and only I know the rules at the moment. Usually practising against comparison but in this case it’s plain to see some wear their instructions on their mouths like lipbalm, while others carry them round sitting in the creases of their hands which can be partially or fully hidden with ease.
Mine are jumbled in a handkerchief at the moment, stuffed in my trouser pocket. The handkerchief is a rectangular excerpt from an old t-shirt folded in half and blanket-stitched around three sides. I have a few handkerchieves that I made one evening in bed listening to a podcast about owls, all similar enough that I can’t tell apart. At the moment I only bring mine out for emergencies, spluttering misremembered words across the cotton. Eventually I will sew them in, make that certain, learn the lines.
People say life is fast. People say time goes slow. For me it’s neither. Because of the way the clock has been organised around the stealing of labour since the industrial revolution, it’s tempting to illustrate time in grids and patterns. The calendar as perfect prison. The day is complete –robust units of measurement.
Time in culture is always in forward motion
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→ →
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Time in nature is always now
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↷ ↔ ↙
↖ ↺
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↨ ↰
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When it’s always now it’s also always good. I did a headstand and before I nearly passed out and kicked down, it occurred to me (the blood brought the thought to my brain) that the scarcity mindset our society is imbued with is also a tool for emotional control. We are not short of anything, or waiting for something else. “Should” is an aggressor. Eckhart Tolle wrote A New Earth, “the only measure of progress is always more. The unchecked striving for more, for endless growth, is a dysfunction and a disease.”
When I’m working too much, I check out emotionally. I drop them in a pile on the floor, occasionally just glancing at them when I enter or exit the room. A housemate might notice the inertia, find a polite way to ask whether I need help with them, or equally politely tell me to pick them up because they are starting to smell.