While writing in a coffee shop a man calls me lovely and a cloud of flies offer me sanctuary
Blackness, aliveness and vision and me.
The last few months, I’ve tried to execute a series of ideas that have emerged through the extensive daily reading I’ve been completing over the summer around nature, black aliveness fugitivity and the gaze.
It’s hasn’t been straightforward or coherent and I’ve been sitting on it, waiting for things to become clearer or at least to make sense. But I realise now I could be waiting years for that to happen if ever it would happen. I feel I’m grappling with intangible messy earthy, hidden spiralling things, concepts, ideas, feelings, and inklings.
So there would just be no perfect time, or perfect means of communicating it. I’m just making sense of things myself, how to envision a different was of being, or living while being enmeshed in the world I’m living in. And how can what I’m doing or creating not just perpetuate continue to adding to the very structures I’m trying to dismantle.
I’m still operating within the same algorithms that keep the machines turning and yearning environmental destruction. Here and now, there seems such a constricted space from which to operate within and yet I’m attempting to create space for something else. Not ‘the other’ but a slow, centred connection to Mother Nature, and self and others.
I had to remind myself today to be. To get out of my head into my body and the sea was there to help me once again. As always but is this always going to be the case? I don’t know. I know I’ve been spending far too much time in my head, in my worry place, in overwhelm space and it would be easier to stay there, crawling back under the covers and numbing myself out.
The North Sea was bitter cold, a chance to be numb yet I’ve never felt more alive. The cold, the windy waves, the silky grey water, the grains of sand in my teeth. The freezing flesh, the in and the out of breath.
Over the last few months, my vision has changed. I’ve been noticing black floaters. Black spots, wispy black lines, that float in and out of my vision when I move my head. Almost as if I’m being plagued by a sea of little black fruit flies just at the side of my vision and when I turn towards them they fly off. It’s annoying and at first disorientating, but I’m getting used to it but still aware of them.
Most eye floaters are caused by age-related changes that occur as the jelly-like substance inside the eyes liquifies and contracts. Fibres form and cast shadows on the retina. These shadows are the floaters.
Instead of focusing on getting older, I’m switching it up and thinking that these floaters are offering me a new way of seeing, a new way for me to approach the world. A new way of seeing which is needed in order to bring about change, to build a new world.
There’s nothing I can do about the floaters, there’s no cure, no treatment, no solution to the problem. I’m falling apart, but in the break, I’m coming alive in another way. That ‘way’ I’m not sure how to describe. It’s incoherent. I just know I’m asking questions, and remaining open and celebrating the senses, the body, the being hereness, uncomfortable and messy. Black and alive.