notes / occasional reflections - 26/7/16
1.
The last time I spoke into a microphone was nearly a year ago, and I said something like this:
After my father's funeral, I would sometimes find myself saying 'we weren't close'. But I soon stopped saying this as it made no sense in language. It didn't explain experience or history, and it didn't tell anyone anything meaningful.
I started to think it was like saying, 'I'm not close to the sun'.
The sun is never not there, even when it's below the horizon, behind clouds - or out of sight, yet shining a light on the moon. In July the earth is around 94.5 million miles from the sun. This is called aphelion, about the farthest away we can get from the nearest star. I read this somewhere. The sun is 400 times as far away as the moon. For some reason this is a measure which I remember, which seems to give some sense of the scale of these kinds of distances.
2.
And now it is five years. Five times around the sun since Dad's death day.
Perhaps you don't 'get over' anything. I would agree. You might dismiss or shrug, and carry on into time as best you can. And yet, unless you allow process, you will miss it's truth.
Stand in the sense of the feeling as experience.
Find the ground.
Some fragments of words drift in, only partly remembered.
generous heart
subtly delightful
innate radiance
a profound silence
This is what bodies are for.
3.
Less than a year ago, during a performance called How the sun lights the earth, I practice remembering the distance of the earth from the sun. I don't use a microphone. And I remember saying something like this:
And the dew drops.
Look closely.
Each holds a colour in the morning sunshine.
Each one a jewel, resting in the grass.
If it catches the light at a particular angle, at the right moment, as you walk by,
slowly, the colour changes
- a green, a golden yellow, a red and a blue.
Because, of course, they are prisms.
