Day 2

There’s a quiet, stillness here. I can hear birds calling to each other & the wind in the trees. The distant rumble of traffic acknowledges that this is a landscape nestled in a city space, and occasional sirens call the prayer of the inner city. Yet: there is a slowing and stilling in this place.

I notice my heart and the undertones of anxiety when breathing deeply. The necessity of the business of work – deadlines encroaching on well-being, entering my dreams, ramped up calls from institutions pulling on my time and focus. I know I’m not alone in this.

How to navigate that though? It’s a puzzle.

A sense of stillness in the midst of a busy city resonates on many levels, not least because it touches us and reminds us somehow of the solitude of such an existence amongst the hustle and bustle of city life. Interventions in city spaces may remind us of the things we can miss in our urban landscapes. We can conceivably reimagine our relationship to them as we soften into witnessing bodies in movement, or in stillness. Miranda Tufnell talks of the gracefulness of our cities, and as these encounters slow our perceptions perhaps we may envisage our terrain more as she does:

As a city empties and fills, shifts gear between day and night, sweats and shivers in different seasons our perceptions of it are also transformed. Its changing lights, scents, sounds, impinge variously upon us- we savour or recoil from them. We see its elements mutate and move under our gaze, one thing evoking another: a wet pavement blooms in brilliant reflected colour, orange and red like the cactus flower; a train beats its way down the track, and earth tremors beneath our feet.  (Tufnell 2004: 251)

Maybe these delicate interventions can afford us a different way to interact with our surroundings, and with our own sense of breath, aliveness, sorrow and self. With this slower ontology we can perhaps re-envision our relationship to the landscapes we inhabit, and therefore to our selves. It relies on openness to our lived experience and a rejection of the disease of busyness, even just for a moment. Omid Safi insists on a type of human-to-human connection where when one of us responds to the question of “How are you?’ by saying, “I am just so busy”, he suggests that we can follow up by saying: “I know, love. We all are. But I want to know how your heart is doing.” (Safi 2014).

Sitting here, I feel my feet on the ground. It helps.

Hands in soil and this year there are more worms. Such welcome guests in earth that is in parts very heavy clay. Washing my hands after pulling weeds in a Birmingham City Council bin full of rainwater. It’s surprising. The water is warm and silky and I feel for a fleeting moment that I am washing away the tears and pain of generations. It becomes like a ritual cleansing.

There’s a quiet joy in this work and activity of nurturing the earth, myself, and my community in what I grow here. It’s more than food growing though: its activity that ties me to my roots, and to my mother. Some of my earliest memories are of the smell of sun on the soft-bronzed skin of her neck. I don’t recall the visceral physicality of the embrace in my tissues, but I can see us as if witnessing the pair of us from a distance, and I can smell her.

Alan Jenkins in his searingly beautiful book ‘Plot 29’ writes:

I am aged maybe six, in shorts and stripy top, on the porch of our Devon house. Lillian is there with me, in her yellow patterned summer dress with blue butterfly-wing broach, sitting, smiling, patiently podding peas into her dented aluminium colander. And as I pick up a pod and help her, I know this is what safety will forever taste like: garden peas freshly picked from the lap of your new mum. (Jenkins 2017)

I post this on instagram and my mother writes: ‘And if I can I’ll keep you safe forever’. Oh.

There’s community here. I arrive and talk with Richard about how tenacious the birds appear to be this year, and the best kind of netting to buy. As I dig out bindweed, Jean and I have a chat about her tai chi class and her back injury, how she has to be selective about what she does, and has to slow down now.  Guy and I talk about the Twyla Tharp piece that Birmingham Royal Ballet are showing in a few weeks. Guy is retiring next year after over 50 years of work; he tells me of his first job as a paperboy and how he has worked every day since. He’s going to take down the greenhouse and shed and replace them with a summerhouse. His grapes vines are doing marvellously and I’m hoping for wine if he is able to make some this year.

At home I listen to episode two of Zadie Smith’s Book of the Week on radio four on catch up. It’s her latest essay collection, and I’m surprised when she reflects on writing and dance.   How apt though. I find myself writing so much these past three years; and even now, writing.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b42z8c         Amongst others, she quotes Martha Graham:

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is on a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others. (Graham in De Mille 1991).

Walking though the city to the launch of BIDF in the oppressive heat I’m struck by the softness of my gaze. I notice trees moving in the breeze as people rush home from work, and the configurations of pedestrians as they navigate the relationships and divides between them. People standing on balconies seem poised for something…

This is giving me a small pause. And surely as artists and academics our job is to think, to question, to find out new things, to make discoveries and share them? It’s so hard to eek out the space, time; to listen to what is arising from deep within us. The answers are all there, but they need time to be nurtured, honoured and bought to fruition.

A lot like gardening. This last notion just occurs to me, and makes me smile.

 

Crickmay, C. & Tufnell, M. (2004) A widening field, journeys in body and imagination, Hampshire: Dance Books

Jenkins, A (2017) Plot 29, Fourth Estate

De Mille, A. (1991) The Life and Work of Martha Graham, Random House

Safi, O. (2014) On Being, The disease of being busy, (online) available from < https://onbeing.org/blog/the-disease-of-being-busy/ > [10 July 2017]