Habit maybe – the desire for the fall to have new learning, the shape of a new path or a new project.
Teacher has asked us not to post about it during the span of the few months of the class – to allow the process to unfold quietly and privately, a seed germinating in the dark.
So here I am teasing you with something I won’t speak of directly just yet.
But as we muck around in the dark of the process, the questions emerge, and we wonder daily… where might they be taking us…?
One thing we were asked to do was choose a piece of music and listen to it every day.
I haven’t quite gotten there yet.
I mean, I listen every day, but I haven’t been able to choose one single track.
I have a short playlist.
I try to take tunes away from it, but…
Mostly I end up adding to it.
This Sigur Ros track in particular has been enchanting me…
Maybe partly because I finally looked up the lyrics, and it wasn’t what I had thought – for years I had imagined, as an English speaker, the words “it’s you” in the refrain.
But it’s not.
The refrain is “Tjú”, which apparently, “has no literal translation as it is not a standard Icelandic word. It functions as a melodic element in the band’s invented syllable-based language, Hopelandic (Vonlenska), and serves as a comforting, rhythmic sound similar to “shh” used to soothe babies to sleep.”
The other night I went out in the dark of the night to begin the project of refreshing the animals, the “critters” I’ve been installing, here and there underneath the Gardiner, along Lakeshore.
I’d done a couple of first instalments on the most front facing pillars on the west side of Sherbourne, and had waded in a little deeper, into a bit of a cavernous wasteland of concrete structures and detritus and so on, looking for another pillar that might hold a bear or a grackle…
And perhaps it’s here that I should mention that it’s the first time I’ve gone out on my own, a lone female at night?
Somewhere a few evenings into the project I realized we didn’t really need to be two people – two people is great if you want a ladder to go higher, or if you want to do larger posts with two parts that need to line up properly, or if you want someone to document what is happening. But it’s not strictly necessary…
I figured it was time to get efficient. To just get out there. Why not just do it on my own.
So there I was, a bit deeper into the gargantuan dark underneath the Gardiner, laying down layers of wheat paste, getting the image straight, when I sensed there was someone to my left.
I turned towards my sense of a figure, and must have jumped visibly, as he said, “sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you!”
He was leaning on his bike – a bike loaded down with what looked like probably all the stuff needed for navigating an entire life in a series of bags and compartments, living out in the city in precisely such liminal spaces as underneath the highway.
“I just wanted to come say, Hi”, he explained.
“I’ve been around here, in this neighbourhood for about four years, and I’ve seen your artworks around, and I just wanted to say, I appreciate you. I appreciate you, I appreciate your art.”
So very sweet, so pure of heart.
If ever I’d had a moment of doubt about the project, if ever I’d wondered if this little project mattered at all in these odd and difficult days in the world, it all vanished in that one sweet tiny phrase, “I appreciate you”.
The day began with breakfast for two at the famous dumpling place on Spadina, and the fortune in my cookie said something stern about <<mettre de l’eau dans son vin>> and as we pushed through the doors and out into the street we debated the meaning of this, the translation, but also the intention of the saying, was it about making concessions, adjustments, or was it about making do with less?
Wandering through Kensington Market, my friend started telling me about a new practice she’s exploring called “Access Consciousness” and how she’s been given a series of questions to ask herself throughout the day – questions like “who does this belong to?” which you ask slowly, repeatedly about emotions, reactions that come up, but then also the question “how does it get any better than this?” which you ask yourself again and again and again, relaxing into all of the truth of the moment and wondering if it possibly could…
HOW does it get any better than this?
How does it get ANY BETTER than this?
How does it get any better than THIS?
This wonderful, meditative question reminded me of the way I feel when working on the 100 Day Challenge I’ve been doing for a couple of months now – it’s purposely not too ambitious, only about the joy of the thing, focused on the simple pleasures of paper, maybe pencil, maybe some watercolours, but who knows, maybe some charcoal depending on the day, depending on the creature, the image.
Seated Hare – charcoal, white charcoal, and watercolour on paper
This week, I am writing about noticing. About paying attention. About exploring what the Universe is telling us. This journey can be both arduous and joyful. It is certainly worthwhile.
Begin here
Paying attention is key to any artistic or life pursuit. It’s how we use all our senses. When we pay attention, we see patterns we otherwise would miss. We hear the chimes of the Universe, taste more intensely, let smell spark memory.
Touch
The most elemental of the senses for artists, even more than sight or hearing, is touch. It is how we relate to our materials. We touch the keyboard, the pens, the yarn, the paint, the fabric, the fragile silk of an emerging flower. Touch the sensitive place behind the ear, the pulse point of understanding.
~ Fran Gardner for The 100 Day Project
* * *
Many blocks further up into Little Italy on such a beautiful sunny day and we sat in the park for what seemed like days, catching up on so many things, but here and there remembering that beautiful question, until it was time to pee so we headed out through a little pathway that had been beaten out amongst some trees and oooo’d and aaaa’d over the little fields of bluebells giving a colourful shape to the path.
How does it get any better?
Up at my friend’s beloved familiar home, we ended up on the back porch as is always the case on a gorgeous spring day, and it was still too cool for the cherry blossoms to have started on the huge cherry tree that dominates the back yard, but I noticed all the textures in little corners of collected objects, of aging wood against cut glass and burnished metal and porous ceramics.
Oh how I miss these kinds of textures that we had everywhere back in the days when we lived in a funny little house with a splendid back yard and a pond and an orange cat and a crumbling wooden fence and moss covered bricks.
After a trundle down Parliament in a busy crowded bus it was getting dark by the time I got to my brand spanking new neighbourhood of concrete and steel and glass, with no gardens, no aging wood or porous ceramics, but lo and behold, there are still moments of magic when the fog from the lake creeps up at dusk and the skies simply couldn’t get any better…
