Hand in glove

So, I was taking pictures of lost and abandoned gloves, not with any clear purpose, but my interest in continuing with that has kind of dried up (I feel like that's an inexcusable pun but I'm not going back and changing it now, I mean, look how many words ago it was) so here's what I did so far.

Aimless project is now concluded

I made a flying visit to Ballarat on the weekend. I cried intermittently in the car on the way there, mainly because I hadn't really slept the night before and I had been drinking, which I have otherwise almost entirely ceased to do, and because I was on my own without knowing whether I wanted to be or not, and also because there are segments of that road where you get the feeling of rising out of the lowlands on a high, open, windswept and sunlit plain and there is no better invitation in the world to open one's heart and let things pour out of it into the big bright sky.

I was, and am, fine, though. I am grieving and sad but it's right.

Balla-raat!?!

me in it (Ballarat)

After Ballarat I spent just enough time at work this afternoon to do this 

 

and then to make a material contribution to the next big collaborative project as it gets under way.  

1000 pieces, greenish-bluish-yellowish mountain reflected in lake type situation, ie hardcore

I don't think I could easily explain to you how important the workplace is to me at the moment. So sometimes the people in it are highly painful. But mostly what happens there is it is taking on the lineaments of a home. If you have been there this will probably strike you as a wrong note. The building has a soul, and its soul inhabits a cold, bare stone chamber, beautiful and serene but anything rather than homely. Yet I have filled the bottom drawer of the office fridge with my food, I cook in there, I wash and dress there, I walk around in the early mornings singing to myself, I keep my coloured pencils and sketchbook and my books and my scarf and raincoat and photographs and sewing things and stuffed animals and postcards piled around my desk. I feel like I live there. I felt like this about La Trobe too. 

I'm not saying I wasn't pretty excited to bugger off early today. I was. 

Then I went to see my doctor, who is now going to be away for six weeks, so prepare yourself to receive all kinds of unfortunate disclosures, and it was a good session. Some pieces of puzzle were fitted together. I had not quite understood before that these pieces existed. Although one of them was a memory of a moment that has been with me since I was thirteen years old, and that I have returned to often without understanding why. I remember looking at myself in a bathroom mirror, just like I am doing in that photograph a little way up this page, only with a much more intense and scrutinising gaze, and noticing a number of things about the colours and shapes of my face, but also thinking that I could not see or understand my own face as a whole thing that I - (or other people?) could recognise. And I still feel like this about my own face. There are things I like about it to a degree that I am almost ashamed of, and other things I dislike greatly about it, but as for how it all fits together, I am completely at a loss to understand. I can draw from memory the faces of people I know but I can't catch my own likeness even drawing in front of a mirror. I have spent a lot of time looking at myself in mirrors recently and I am beginning to understand why.

After the doctor I got Leonard from school and took him home, played with him and cooked him some pasta. Then I went to my yoga class. It was a little less physically challenging than usual and I found I had some mind available for thinking about the psychic experience of the yoga I was doing. The thing I love about yoga is the beautiful and elegant way it works in the mind and body simultaneously, sometimes the relationship is parallel, sometimes it is metaphoric, sometimes it's a linkage. For once I disregarded the teacher's gentle reminders this evening to recall the mind when it wandered, and let mine wander. A very warm room, a sequence of strong hip-opening poses, followed by warriors 1-3 and I felt vibratingly open and alive all the way down the core of my body, and a desire to hold this vivid openness in my body with strength and ease after the poses released. As I lay down to rest at the end of the class I slipped back into a dream I had had the night before, a sexual dream I suppose, but in the half-trance in which I lay it was not explicit or even specific. It was just a feeling that now penetrated and permeated my warm, flushed, stretched organs and limbs with the blood that I could feel pulsing through my system. Openness: that's what I'm here for. 

After yoga I completed my Monday night ritual with a visit to the felafel shop. My life is going to change soon and I will not always be able to do these things. But there will be different things to replace them. It was raining steadily and I did not want my food to get wet so I took off my jumper and t-shirt, replaced the jumper and used the t-shirt to wrap my dinner in. I put the bundle into the carrier basket of my bike and rode home, singing in the dark and the cold wet rain. I ate, put on my pyjamas and got into bed, and here we are. Sleep well.