I never would think that once a week is so often. I never would think that nineteen weeks is so much time. A repotted fragment of a broken geranium on my desk is about to flower.
Clutter distracts me. Thinking about diagnostic criteria for various things and just what to do with them.
One needs to be passionate about something in order to make good films. Being passionate about filmmaking is not enough, I concluded. It’s just a medium.
Similarly, I don’t write because I love writing itself. I write because I care.
Although, often I find myself blanked, emptied. Then, writing serves as a tool for rekindling the caring. Reawakening interests, reconfiguring as a self. Redirecting the process of becoming.
So writing journals, and now a substack, is a way of reunderstanding existence, keeping myself alive, finding meaning that slips from me in daily steps.
Awareness can be very exhausting.
The neighbour’s black cat steps carefully on the roof of their shed, slowly approaching some kind of prey on the ground. I hear a bark. I hope they’re friends.
I circulate through levels of connection and disconnection - between my body and the environment, my consciousness and the external world.
Again this week I haven’t had time to read.
I have a cold and the thoughts that are forming in my mind fail to take shape fully, tangled in tinnitus and itchy eyes. I am holding back and not putting all of myself in this writing.
I love my green velvet chair, so ideally fit for sitting cross-legged. I think I’ll make breakfast in a moment.
Every sensation, every fragment of reality of my conscious experience is so swollen and squirming for attention that sometimes it all just flips into a sense of emptiness. I cleared up sticky notes from above my desk. Their colours were fluorescent bright and my eyes couldn’t take it anymore. The desk looks calmer. I relocated the piles of books onto the bookshelf and it made my head clearer.
I keep thinking about how it has been a year since I quit my job at the pub, before moving out at the start of June. I miss our garden the most.
I am intending to write more about my research as soon as I have the time to get refocussed on it. At the moment, the daily life is full of work - at the gallery, at the university, editing, and watching film entries. They’re all new career developments on paths I am excited to take. But I am looking forward to the summer, when I can focus on my own work more, pouring myself into sensory journals of moments of absorption, and reading about ideas that make it interconnected and potentially relevant. I feel irrelevant and have to practice awareness of being alive in order to continue becoming.