Monday, March 30, 2020

What Covid has Shifted

There's a loss of level footing to even talk about what's going on.  Artists/Energy workers are quite familiar with fractured, fragmented truths:  the image of the Kaleidoscope as the Vision Tool/Metaphor of our age.  Same Stuff, Jumbled  and Re-Ordered over and over.
Another image is The Grasshopper Mind

The Four Shifts:

TIME SHIFT      Slow!   Waiting, Allowing for things to appear in their time

Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared. A where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars. Have they vanished along with footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature?     Milan Kundera  Slowness, HC 1995 p3

 







(Yikes, I just saw that I also posted this poem in 2013, a few post below!)
Keeping Quiet             Pablo Neruda   

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
for once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go

Learning to consult, wait, listen.  Resist the nudgy lure is to immediately organize and create new systems, to be Pro Active too quickly.  If disappointment, frustration presents. Just be with them for a while.  They are often disguised forms of something more interesting and nourishing.

SLOW reactions: have their own ways.   “Organic” Implications  always shifting, seasons  Rhythmic, tidal, seeping, oozing, fermentation, techtonic 

Artists/Energy Workers have to develop and extend our capacity to be “propassive”  ... Championing the virtues of not being Active too soon.  Pro Passive is related to the Positive NO
Another Time Shift is the shifting of expected and real time between Contact and Response. In the previous well-tuned world, IMMEDIACY was expected. Oops. days go by...

SPACE Shift   Layers are emerging. This Social Distancing…  Six Feet, Six Feet, 
Most Interesting is the Re-centering on the House, The Home   Before it was generally a waystation.  Now it's a Center.  Other Cultures, particularly older, slower ones knew something of Household Deities, small gods, helpers and tricksters at once. Creating both Order and Disorder
Since we are now At Home so much more, our encounters with these small gods is evermore likely.  Get to know more about them.  Here     and      Here 



POWER SHIFT:  SENSE OF SAFETY  CONTROL, DIRECTION  

Our Old ways, Categories, Labels, Sorting, Mapping don’t work as well or at all . We are vulnerable, 
We worry  Basics: food, toilet paper, ammo, but deeper ones: Awe , wonder, Feral, Stories, Making ..  Covid has forced its way into consciousness. From Where?  Other times? Other responses: Covid is only a manifestation of some inner turmoil we have felt.   Entrophy. 

LANGUAGE-BEHAVIOR SHIFT contagion,  social distancing, Drive through testing, Not Enough, binge shopping, hoarding, 20-seconds, isolation.  Please add your new words to this list


Sunday, March 29, 2020

Drafting Artists and EnergyWorkers

Like many of us quarantined at home, I cannot make ventilators, nor sew masks very well.  How can this be a time to experiment with Other Ways. 
Practices in times of transition    an adaptation of The Casual Alchemist
That though the radiance which was once so bright be now forever taken from my sight. 
Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, glory in the flower.
We will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind         William Wordsworth
For those of us who have not yet been designated Essential Workers: It’s a good time to step back and explore this unexpected gift and shift of time/space/distress.  What are our skills, practices and attitudes that may provide solace, insight, direction?  

But first, how can we just describe what’s happening?                         
Jolt, seismic, fissures opened.   The airlines have been helping us understand this for years with kind, but firm warnings of  Unexpected Turbulence” and “Things May Have Shifted”. Did we listen?  

The portals have moved. There's an Imbalance. There are changes in mood, sleep, body, vision, hearing, memory, centrality, responsibility, visibility; a hunger for something more, yet different.  The Third Eye blinks?    Who am I when I am no longer doing, no longer productive, no longer indispensable to so many others? No longer wearing the masks? Where does my attention go? Am I shedding objects, clothes, books, body?   Am I grumpy, angry, annoyed, foggy, sad?”  

As poet W. H. Auden  put it:    We are being lived by powers we pretend to understand